Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <395042D8.F250D99A@wanadoo.nl>,
ruud.dingemans <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl> wrote:
 
>> I've never seen a more impotent computer than the Apple Lisa....
> 
> Hey, a bit more respect for the grandmother of all modern personal
> computers, ok.
 
FYI: the majority of today's modern computers did NOT evolve from the
Lisa.  Many people frown on this, but "the grandmother of most modern
computers" happens to be the IBM PC.  Reality isn't always as
exciting as some would like it to be.
 
> It may have been a flop at the time because of cost, but it started a
> revolution nonetheless.
 
No it didn't.  The original idea was stolen by Apple from Xerox, so
Lisa wasn't the original computer with a GUI.  And the Lisa was
simply too expensive to start a "revolution" on the market -- the
Macintosh did that.
 
That won't leave much of a revolution to the Lisa, right?
 
> (Besides, this thing had some *cool* hardware specs that the Mac
> didn't have at the time.)
 
Possibly -- I never immensed myself into the architecture of the
Lisa.  I noted that, besides being expensive and slow, it also broke
a tradition from the Apple II:  the Lisa, and later the Mac, were much
more closed systems.
 
The tradition of being an open system was carried over by the PC line
of computers (Apple advocates sometimes describe this as "the IBM PC
stole many ideas from the Apple II", but as we've already seen, Apple
too stole design ideas).  Ironically, IBM itself tried to change this
to closed systems, when they introduced their PS/2 line of computers.
And today few people use PS/2 computers, and IBM is almost gone from
the PC scene.
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
And, yes, I'll give the Lisa and Mac another credit: they spawned a
religious war which was to last for over a decade, about which was
the "best" computer.  This war even raged on within Apple, and in the
end it killed the Apple II line of computers some years earlier than
it otherwise probably would have died.  It became particularly
pathetic when people advicating the Mac, Atari and Amiga got together
to hotly debate *which* GUI was the "best"....
 
 
Today, things have calmed down a bit: all modern computers use a GUI
of some kind.  The Mac has "opened up" a bit (I think), and it can
even read standard diskettes instead of using its own weird low-level
diskette format (which means only software add-ons are needed for a
Mac to read a PC diskette, or a PC to read a Mac diskette).

And of course everyone are hooked up to the Internet nowadays, which
means differences in diskette formats no longer really matter much.
And the Internet was invented neither by Apple, nor by IBM or Microsoft...


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