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Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

Payton Byrd wrote:


"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message
loidnRH2VNP8i4nbnZ2dnUVZ_s3inZ2d@comcast.com">news:loidnRH2VNP8i4nbnZ2dnUVZ_s3inZ2d@comcast.com...

I guess being the "underdog" confers the right to fight dirty...
;-)



Um... no.  I think this is actually to the point: most people don't
actually root for the underdog unless the underdog is clearly better.
Up until Mac OS X, that was not even close to being the case for the
Macintosh.  The original 128k Mac was useless and by the time the Mac
SE was around the Amiga 1000 was out and clearly the tech lead had
been lost, and it would stay lost to any number of machines until the
Intel-based Mac OS X machines became available.
The only point in the life of pre OS X Macintosh that was technically interesting was the development of A/UX. I saw a demonstration in '87 of a Mac II running unix, X (X10 I believe at that time), and Mac apps alongside each other - in color. And this was when a Sun 3/110 was the hot setup. Like so many things at Apple, they completely botched it. Apple then went looking for a next generation OS for PowerPC when they already had it working on m68k. I still keep my SE/30 powered up with A/UX just to feel the raw power of unix running on something about as powerful as my coffee maker. 


But in the 8-bit world, the Apple II was definitely the way to go if
you required lots of random expandability and price was not a big
consideration.  Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs overpriced the things
and so they never acquired the market share that could have been had
with just a reasonable price tag for a machine with two disk drives,
128k and a printer.
Well, how else were they going to fund Jobs's ego and Sculley's incompetence :-) At least Jobs has made up for past transgressions - in my mind anyway. 

Dave...