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

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 03:53:58 -0700, heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote
(in article <1175943238.882463.85860@q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>):

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

I didn't own any commercial computer. I made a decision to buy an OSI 
Challenger system instead of a DEC PDP lab system. My thinking was that I 
could send data sets to the campus 11/70 for number crunching. After I added 
an AMD9511 to the 6502 in the Challenger, I could beat the 11/70 which was 
being used by dozens of people at a time. I was able to Apple's for research 
setups after that.  So, I used them at work, first doing instrumentation and 
later writing Forth implementations at Mountain View Press.

My brother bought a TI 99/100 (?) which had a nice architecture but was sold 
as a TV gaming toy. It had upward growth in the chip set. I have a complete 
TI 32000 development chip set and docs and ROMs I will be trying to sell 
soon.

I learned most from a Rockwell AIM-65 in which I swapped the BASIC ROMs for 
the Rockwell Forth ROMs.

I teach high school physics these days. Most of you may not be aware that in 
the US public schools they no longer teach any computer programming or other 
skills. The exception is an elective "tools" class in high school with MS 
Office and MS certification in board swapping and software installing and 
other trivia.

I asked students this year if anyone knew any computer languages. One student 
knew some C and HTML. Most agreed with a very sharp girl in AP Physics who 
said "I use english with mine".

I was talking to a friend at Apple night before last about this and he said 
he has a very hard time finding people who know any hardware. I know hardware 
because when I started using micros the AIM-65 and Apple II were very well 
documented open systems. The micros from other manufacturers suffered greatly 
in this area. I never considered S100, IMSAI, etc. It is odd what things will 
turn you off, but back then circuit board real estate was very valuable and 
to see the S100 crowd using unregulated power on the buss and putting two or 
four big regulators ON EACH BOARD (!) was enough to tell me they were not 
going anywhere.

It is true about Apple pricing. It wasn't just because they could. Until very 
recently they have had a company culture problem that prevented them from 
ever figuring out how to get high enough volume to meet demand. They didn't 
want to be a "commodity" producer. They avoided advertising because it would 
strain production! They had the opportunity to sponsor a NASCAR team and 
become "The Official Computer of NASCAR". This is the biggest spectator sport 
in the US by far and the big companies know the value of being involved. At 
Apple, they really didn't want "those kind of people" (beer drinkers and 
Republicans) using their computers :-) Crazy, eh?

-- Charlie Springer