Bill Garber wrote:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but card edge expansion devices did exist before the Apple II, otherwise there would have been no card slots to buy to put in them. They existed, maybe not in a personal computer, but they did exist. I should know. I inserted many a new card into the control of an NC machine in the early '70's.Bill, that's not what they said. They were discussing the devices that ended up being put into those slots, not the technology of slotsthemselves.RoyNo Roy, I read it right. I talked about devices to go into slots too. Most all expansion devices do some type of control and/or communication. That all existed long before the Apple II. Woz worked for HP, correct? What do you think they made?
Ok, you are right, but still missed the point, which wasn't that there weren't devices to insert into slots, (note the reference to serial and parallel devices below) but that NEW devices would be invented to utilize those slots (note the references to the Mockingboard and X-10 devices - no doubt your NC machine could control many things, but I doubt that there had been an X-10 for it, why would someone buy such an expensive machine just to control the lighting in their home!)
Full quote of the argument is below. Roy
Chuck Morris wrote:Dr. Richard E. Hawkins <hawk@slytherin.ds.psu.edu> wrote in message news:bccr8r$18pa$8@f04n12.cac.psu.edu...The expansion slots are being looked at entirely from the wrong angle. What the Apple and a couple of others did wasn't so much adding expansion boards to a base machine, but providing a complete base machine on the motherboard, rather than distributed across a couple of slots on the motherboard a la S-100 and SS-50 (?). Others (TRS-80, PET) went further, abandoning the slots entirely.IMHO, what you think of as going further, many of us at the time would have viewed as being short sighted. The point of the slots was not simply to allow the addition of such things as serial and parallel ports, but to allow the addition of other things that had not yet been developed. Saying "nobody needs slots now" would be somewhat akin to saying "everything worth being developed has already been developed". While the Apple II design could have added a number of ports to it's base design without using slots, eliminating slots would have limited expansion abilities. When the Mockingboard came out for instance, I was glad to have a slot to plug it into, and when I discovered a board that provided control of X-10 appliances, I used that to make my Apple the heart of a burglar alarm system for the apartment I lived in at the time. Neither of those types of expansion devices existed at the time that the first Apple II came off the line, but the inclusion of slots in the design allowed them to be used when they were developed later.And was probably intsrumental in encouraging the development of such devices.
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