Re: Apple IIx

[Forrest <bctimes@hotmail.com>]

Rubywand wrote:
>>Established II users at the end of 1984 would be...people with IIs
>>and II Pluses, who were by then a minority of the Apple II
>>population.
>Hard to say. A lot of those IIe's were going into schools all over
>the world.

Even if half of the 1.5 million sold went into schools the II and II+
people would have been in the minority; just a larger minority.

>      The standard interface was Applesoft BASIC under DOS 3.3 or ProDOS. In 1984,
> it was still chiefly BASIC + DOS 3.3.

Interface for...?  Most all commercial programs were
insert-disk-turn-on-power
deal-with-individual-program designs.

>Didn't matter. Once you saw one of the hi-res text displays on a PC
>clone--i.e. sharp, clear fonts where you couldn't see the dots--
>you knew the Apple II text display was toy stuff.

Personally I wondered why the characters were so blocky and why
the whole screen blinked every time it scrolled a line at the
DOS prompt...silly CGA display...

>So, whatever Apple's IIe sales and whatever the new software, it
>should be no surprise that a darkening cloud of pessimism served to
>damper II user enthusiasm. 1984 was definitely _not_ a hot year for
>II computing.

I think you mean your personal enthusiasm as a first-waver.
1984 was the first year of AppleWorks, the second killer app,
when the paradigm shifted to the second wave.

>A major part of being interested and involved and the feelings of
>optimism was that the individual user had such extraordinary control
>of the machine. If you wanted to add a hires screen dump to your
>printer interface, you could easily figure out how (or get help)
>and burn a PROM to do it. The same goes for making your own
>games-- which you could get published in mags like SoftSide.

See?  Programmer/hacker stuff before; user stuff after.
You don't need a decent keyboard or an eighty-column display or
big memory or storage space to do any of that, and for those
oriented toward those things the selling points of the IIe
wouldn't mean much.  (On the other hand, a few years later
the selling points of the Amiga might...)
For those that wanted a solution out of the box, things
were rather different.

-- 
My other computer is an Apple II.