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

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:51:23 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote
(in article <leednat5-pnXa4rbnZ2dnUVZ_r-onZ2d@comcast.com>):

> As a customer, I hate paying premium prices for products, but I do
> appreciate the benefits to the product line that can result over the
> long term.  Apple has frequently been the first to bring a new
> technology into the mainstream (at least as a minority platform).

I was for a time an editor for 'develope', Apple's developer journal. I was 
able to see all the cool projects in order to plan 6 to 18 months ahead and 
get people working on sample code and articles. You would be amazed - yes I 
think you would no matter what you have imagined - at the number of amazing 
projects that get tried and dumped in order to come up with the best 
products. This includes complete competing OS's, software and hardware 
alternatives of various flavors worked to pre-production phase then flown off 
against each other. Firewire is a good example of a winner that took a while 
to catch on.

There are also things that Apple has made available that the industry just 
didn't seem to notice, like AUX with Commando, a dialog that appears with 
check boxes for all the options of any unix command, and A/ROSE.

Have you ever wondered why it is harder to position a PC cursor where you 
want it than a Mac cursor? Check how the origin of the coordinate system is 
defined in the two OS's. Apple R&D often goes further back and has more depth 
than people would guess. For example, Jef Raskin wrote a thesis on graphical 
user interfaces in 1967. He called his concept QuickDraw.

Now where was I? Oh right. I'm going to stick a CF card in a //e in the shed 
and put all of Kyan pascal in one of the partitions. What is the easiest way 
to scan a book? I want to convert the Kyan manual to PDF.

-- Charlie Springer