Re: ANN: Retiring from A2 world - Good Bye All!

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.ca>]

Tom Zuchowski wrote:
 
> You got me! <g> That =was= a rather stupid thing for me to have said. Still,
> I think that the A/// could have been a real contender if Apple had not been
> so stupid with the chip sockets, and an A///+ with 65816 might have carried
> on the legacy.
> 
> As for the S100 machine being the business standard, I suppose you are
> right, but every computerized store I remember seeing around here had an
> Apple II+ on the counter. (Then again, an S100 wouldn't have been on the
> counter, would it? I may be way off base.) Also, I am not aware of an S100
> equivalent of VisiCalc.
> 
> I'm to this day a staunch 8-bit guy, and I never did see a lot of difference
> between the Mac and the IIgs apart from the backward-compatibility issue. I
> know that about the only time I ever bothered to boot into GSOS was when I
> needed to use GShrink. If Apple had been wise enough to offer a IIe card in
> the early Mac days, the GS might not have done as well as it did, such as
> that was.
> 
> I gave some more thought to this, and it occurs to me that apart from
> anything else, the Apple II was probably doomed because of the 6502
> architecture. Now that you mention it, I do remember a lot of talk in
> various magazines about the superiority of the 16-bit architecture for the
> very reason you cited (which I deleted from the quote.)

I like my IIgs but I always thought Apple would have been better off if 
instead of producing the IIgs, they'd built in support so the Macs disk 
port could handle a 5.25" drive and put in a slot for a IIe card. 
Possibly just had a joystick port on the card. If the Mac could handle
a 5.25" drive then anyone wanting to move to a Mac or have both Macs and
Apple IIs wouldn't have had any problem transferring files. And if you 
actually needed to run an Apple II program you could've sprung for the 
card.
That wouldn't have helped CP/M users but I imagine someone would have 
produced a Z80 card to go in that slot soon enough. 
Maybe there would have been fewer pissed off people dropping the Apple
II 

	Wayne