Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II

["Chuck Morris" <nospam@nospam.net>]

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.