Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps)]

supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:

I'll note a few small dissagreements:

>When the Macintosh did not sell well and the A2 continued to
>provide most of Apple's revenues in the early 80s, Apple had to
>fire Steve Jobs.  With Steve Jobs gone, they finally came out
>with the Apple IIGS.  Now the Apple IIGS' 65C816 outperformed
>the 286 at the equivalent Mhz.  It could do 8 MIPS at 16Mhz,
>which was many more MIPS that the 286 at the equivalent
>Mhz.

I think the main reason for Jobs going started earlier on. He was obsessed with
his vision of the original Mac and insisted that it have no slots or any way to
add on. Memory was 128K or 256K, period. In many ways a good idea that fitted
with the Raskin information appliance concept (which was the name of our
company which Jef founded when he left Apple by the way).   However, this
clashed with the needs of the market at the time for expandability. Note that
when Jobs started NeXT the first boxes had no floppy drive, only a CD despite
the cries of potential users.

>By this time, Apple decided that Macintosh was Apple's
>future.  Now heres the irony: they finally come out with an
>Apple IIGS and it has better graphics and sound than the
>IBM clones of the day (which were doing EGA and not yet
>SoundBlaster).  Its speed was not spectacular, but comparable
>to an IBM AT revision 2 (8Mhz 286).  By releasing the IIGS,
>Apple convinces many Apple II users that this was Apple's
>future.  BUT, there is virtually no A2 development after this.
>There was no Apple IIGS to Macintosh transition.

I must also point out that it is impossible to write an event driven
deterministic GUI OS for the Apple II family or Wintel boxes because of the
type of floppy drives they have. The Sony self ejecting drive was crucial for a
properly executing system. You can not cover all the possible error syndromes
if the user can pop a disk out (or switch disks) without the OS knowing, let
alone if the OS needs to read or write. That is why Wintel stuff is full of all
those "are you sure" dialogs and disk grinding noises as it checks for
presence.

When it comes to memory, whether it be RAM, ROM, hard drive or floppy, the OS
MUST be in charge! In Win95 and DOS or UNIX, this is handled by making the
operator "mount" and "dismount" a "volume" for it to be used legally by the OS,
though this is hidden to some extent in some of these. In the Mac OS, the
volume is mounted by insertion in the slot and is dismounted by the OS. This
was ridiculed by "experts" in the beginning but let me tell you, the Microsoft
OS team would give its collective left nut for deterministic floppy drives in
the PC world.

What happened at Apple with the Mac is so divergent from mainstream computing
thought of the time, when in a good university you were batch processing or
time-sharing on a DEC or CDC or UNIVAC, or got to share a DEC 11/xx running
RMX, that it took ten years for the reality to sink in about the right way to
do event driven user interfaces out in the rest of the world. Those who think
Win95 is basically Mac like are mistaken. The differences may appear small, but
they are legion and add up to the difference between understanding human
interface design and copying others.

Charlie Springer

Charlie Springer