Re: Apple IIx

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

hgrabows@vt.edu (Hank) wrote:

>Hey all,
>
>As a previous/current Apple //c user, I had my
>appetite whetted by the seeing of some cancelled
>follow on project called the Apple IIx.  This was
>supposed to be the sucessor to the Apple IIgs.
>
>Unfortunately the one link I've been able to find
>went to a web page that used to contain a FAQ.  
>That web page has since been replaced with a 
>rather scathing review of the Apple II community.
>
>Is there any information out there about this
>product.  I know there are a couple of books on
>Apple that talk about projects which never 
>went into production, but I'm looking for something
>on the web about it.

According to the several magazine articles I have that
covered the release of the Apple IIGS, the IIx IS the
IIGS.

The rumors of the IIx were circulated by none other
than Steve Wozniak, who in a Compuserve chat
described the IIx as a computer with a "revolutionary"
processor that could emulate the IIe's 65C02 and yet
address 16MB linearly.  He said to watch for the IIx
to be released some time in 1983.

The project was cancelled for a time and Wozniak
left Apple for a time.  The project was later revived
and Wozniak, after completing his degree at UC
Berkeley, returned to Apple as an engineer on the
IIGS design team.

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.  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.

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.  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.

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.

Unfortunately, before the IIGS was released, Woz left
Apple again.  This, coupled with his early absense,
meant that Jobs' influence permeated throughout Apple.
The Macintosh division was king.  Even after John
Sculley, fed up with Steve Jobs championing his Mac
"family" of a team and calling everyone else (the Apple
II division) an outsider, fired Jobs and reintegrated the
two divisions, the harm was done.  Mac folks dominated.
Advertising and R&D were pulled from the IIGS.

The later models that Woz envisioned the IIGS pushing
the user base to never came.  Apple wanted the users
to drop everything and go Mac instead, abandoning all
their investment in hardware and software.  Apple II
users got fed up and decided that defecting to the PC
was the way.  After all, on a PC, I can be sure that the
hardware and software I buy will work on AT LEAST the
next two or three model revisions (in a time span of
about five years).