Re: Apple, IBM and PCs (Re: Apple, Jobs, and the irony of it)

[Richard Kilpatrick <richard@dmc12.demon.co.uk>]

In message <3ff9b151$1_5@corp.newsgroups.com>, Exegete 
<millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> writes
> But it was an improvement - more speed, more memory, 80 columns, more 
> color too, right? No? Yes, it did take the C-64 to the level of a //e 
> (at least), and it did have an improved CPU, but granted, it was 
> certainly not a //gs.

Yes, the 128 was an improvement, but it was almost a backward step for 
Commodore.

Apple's 8-bit product line is beautifully defined, simple, and largely 
compatible. Apple ///s can run Apple ][ software reasonably well, yet in 
'81 offered 256K RAM, battery backed clock, integrated storage and HD 
capability, and high-res, 16 colour graphics (anyone with an Apple /// 
should plug their IIgs monitor into it).

Commodore's is littered with dead ends. From the PET (comparable, quite 
well, with the Apple ][+ in the more upmarket models like the 32N), we 
get the VIC-20 with 22 column screen, the C64, and the SuperPETs with 
occasionally different CPUs. From the C64 we get the Plus/4 and C16 
models, which inevitably are a dead end and wholly incompatible with the 
C64. Then, despite the work done on TED with 121 colour graphics, the 
C128 goes back to a VIC-II with an 80 column chip tacked on, and in the 
case of the DCR model, 64Kb of mostly unused Video RAM, inaccessible for 
most normal uses but not always present in a C128, so of no use to 
developers.

And that's without looking at the P-series models, the 9000 and ventures 
into 6809 and 6800 architecture.

Apple, OTOH, stuck with a winning formula. Someone who bought an Apple 
][ in 1977 would be quite likely to be able to use their software on 
their 1989 IIgs or //c+, but in the case of the IIgs, they also got a 
computer that was in many ways better than the 16 bit, incompatible 
offerings from Atari and Commodore. In fact, with the LC and //e card, 
they could even use the 32-bit machine to run their software...

As I've said before, the only other company to have done that well was 
Acorn, and they did it more by selling the same bloody product for 10 
years - the BBC Model A, B, B+, Master are essentially the same beast 
with different memory and motherboard revisions. Attempts to break out 
of this pattern generally involved crippled hardware (the Acorn 
Electron), strange things which used a BBC B for I/O and alternative CPU 
boards which were almost whole computers (such as the Cambridge 
Workstation, one of the first 32-bit desktop workstations). The only 
variation was an attempt to work with the same CPU as the IIgs, which 
resulted in an incompatible machine which never reached full production 
(the Acorn Communicator).

Richard
--
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