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

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

On Apr 7, 10:41 am, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
> In article <0001HW.C23C85C5005E6427F0284...@news.nw.centurytel.net>,
> Charlie Springer  <R...@regnirps.com> wrote:
> >
> > It is just that calling Commodore products "computers" is a little offensive.
> > Really really slow drive controllers maybe? (I had to write Forth drivers for
> > them once. Unbelievable! And IEEE interface. Aaaarggghhh!)
>
> Whether to call a device a "computer" or not should be a matter of
> terminology, not of personal feelings of offense.  The Commodore
> computers certainly were more powerful than the ENIAC.  Was the ENIAC
> a computer?  If so, do you feel offended by that?  If not, what would
> be the minimum requirements for you to call some device a "computer"?

While I think that Charlie's reply was meant more funnily than
seriously here, there is another aspect of "Non-Apple computing":

The "Commies" were, together with similar "low-cost machines"
like the Atari 400/600, Sinclairs, Dragons, Orics etc., sometimes
the *only* machines a lot of families could afford.

Especially in Europe or more generally:
Practically everywhere except the USA ;-)

In Germany for example Apple even took more money from its
customers because of localization costs. This is of course
understandable from a business standpoint but we all know
that the II-family was a cash cow and Apple chose to sell less
and have a higher profit per machine.
In other words: They didn't try to buy the European market.

The Europeans that were really keen on an Apple (adult hobbyists,
professors, teachers, even small entrepreneurs) often got a clone
instead. Why no original? Consider that the average income in
Germany at the time was half(!) of that in the USA. I suspect that
the situation in other European countries was at least similar.
And I don't want to even mention Eastern Europe here ;-)

Back to the children:

I guess that the Non-Apples started at least as many careers in
the bedrooms of 12-year-olds who could only convince their
fathers to shell out for a smaller machines.

And I'm sure we all don't need to fight over the argument that
it is better to give the children a less powerful computer than
none at all.
See, what the kid does with it and if the interest in computing
remains strong then give him or her a better machine.

Recently, I experienced a similar discussion when the so called
"$100 laptop" was unveiled. It's raw performance may be laughable
in todays times with multi-core CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and hard-
disks just over the terabyte barrier.
But it's an ingenious little machine and a lot of thought and inno-
vations went into it (its networking abilities and the special LCD).
It seems like a device that could children not only teach computing
but much more.
I absolutely love it and would buy one for twice the amount to
finance another for some child in a third world country if I could
get my hands on one.

bye
Marcus