Re: Apple IIx

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Supertimer wrote:
> 
 ....
 
> At the time, the IIGS design team had made a mess
> of his IIx project.  They wanted a "pure" GS side
> motherboard with a IIe emulation card in a special
> processor slot.  The slot could also be used to hold
> an MS-DOS processor card or even a Mac processor
> card.
> 
> Wozniak would have none of this.

     Too bad. The IIgs design team was right.


> He wanted the IIGS
> to be a real Apple II so that the II users would trust it.
> Thus, it was Woz who proposed the "slow" 128k RAM
> roped off for IIe compatibility controlled by a custom
> chip, the Fast Processor Interface (FPI) which sat
> between the 65C816 and the Mega II IC.  Basically, he
> had the 8-bit emulation stiched so tightly into the IIGS
> motherboard that it was invisible.

     And, it is ... _unless_ you want to do a major hardware upgrade. The
FPI + Mega stuff wraps itself all over the system making major mods very
difficult and expensive.

     Another bad decision was sticking with the old Slots. A pure GS could
have had Slots with complete addressing and some useful interface signals
which would have made graphics expansion via a Slot card  feasible.



> 
> Woz figured that the IIGS would provide a bridge out
> of the 8-bit world by straddling the 8-bit and 16-bit
> worlds.  After several years, he figured, new IIGS models
> could then be purely 16-bit clean and eventually 32-bit
> with the 8-bit side relegated purely to software based
> emulation.  This would give the user base a five year
> transition window to move out of the past and into the
> future.

     All of which would be easier to swallow _if_ the GS had been the best
computer. Lacking a hard disk pretty well killed any chances for making
such a claim. Failing to offer 256-colors in 320 mode and 16 in 640 mode
was another screw-up.

     What Apple needed to do in 1986 was murder the competition. Instead,
they offered a product with an appeal limited chiefly to II users.
Basically, Apple 'never showed up' when it came to taking on the PC with
an Apple II.

     Had the cost of implementing the MEGA2 and Fast Processor Interface
been invested in new Slots, better graphics, more RAM, and a reasonably
priced hard disk, II users would still have snapped up the GS. What
matters more, everyone else would have, too.



> Similar to how in the past five years, the PC
> world has used motherboards with both ISA and PCI
> slots.  ISA is the old standard and PCI was the goal,
> but by giving users a 5 year window to move to the
> new standard, everyone is happy.  When PCI pure
> motherboards come, few users would mind.
>

     This sort of thing works fine when you are the standard platform and
everything is cheap. Had the original GS been designed as a pure, hot
machine, it could have become the standard platform by 1988.



 
> Woz's stategy was in stark contrast to the Macintosh,
> which cut off compatibility from day one.  That was
> Steve Jobs' idea.  He favored innovation, true, but at the
> expense of the users.  Woz wanted innovation but the
> preservation of the user base too.
 ....

     Which just means neither one of Apple's leaders knew what was going
on. You can win quickie profits by targeting small markets. You can win
pats on the shoulder for sticking up for compatibility no matter what.

     Or, you can build the best computer for the money and win the whole
ball of wax.



Rubywand