sicklittlemonkey wrote:
On Mar 31, 7:29 pm, "biel...@terra.es" <biel...@terra.es> wrote:I think that BBC's Basic is a marvelous gem : <http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk>, and the BBC computers themselves too. The Apple II stands quite well compared to the BBC's 6502 computers, unlike this Micro-Soft's (P.O.C.) Applesoft thing that made its way into it... :-( (AppleSoft predates BBC's Basic by several years, though)BBC Basic is certainly more powerful than Applesoft, but the base BBC is also more powerful than the base Apple II. (2Mhz CPU, Mockingboard- like sound chip etc.) Perhaps this was because it was later to market (1981) - though the //e certainly wasn't a competitive offering in 1983. The only real hardware addition was double-hires, with no Applesoft support for it.
A couple of points to consider... Applesoft is a 10KB interpreter, while BBC BASIC appears to be 16KB-- which allows for a considerable increase in functionality. The //e was not a clean-slate design of a contemporary competitive machine. It was a minimally-incompatible "enhancement" to a proven design with tens of thousands of programs extant. From Apple's point of view, it was actually a cost reduction re-design using more modern technology to do essentially the same job while canonizing certain expansion features and interfaces. Adding major functionality, or even speeding it up, would have been a *much* more difficult undertaking, and would have risked a compatibility (or at least a culture) "disconnect" with the existing Apple II world (as I believe the later IIgs demonstrates). Apple has been much criticized in the II world for abandoning the II line to focus on the Mac. But if the choice is staying with your (past) customers or staying with (even leading) the market with a new competitive-technology platform, then I think we can all agree what must be done from a business perspective. I think that Apple was unusually supportive of an "old" platform-- look at the production schedule and new peripheral introductions for the II line far past its actual competitiveness as a platform. Most companies show much less reticence about leaving their early adopters behind as they pursue the mass market. I attribute this long-tailed support for the II line as a mixture of sentimentality within the company for the II and the _esprit de corps_ of the dwindling II team. -michael NadaNet networking for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."