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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3D0CB145.E23DE660@intergate.ca>,
Wayne Stewart  <waynes@intergate.ca> wrote:
 
> 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 
 
Ironically you had to get an IBM PC (or a clone) for maximum
backwards compatibility to the Apple II and to CP/M !!!!  Early in
the PC history, there were add-on cards which both emulated an Apple
II and even were capable of reading Apple II formatted disks --
through a special disk controller of course....  And with the
exception of Apple CP/M, the PC could, though software only, read
hundreds of different CP/M formats.  You could also replacfe the 8088
CPU with the NEC V20 CPU, an 8088 compatible CPU which also had
an 8080 mode you could switch to!
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se
WWW:     http://hem.passagen.se/pausch/index.html
         http://home.tiscali.se/~pausch/