Re: Apple III???

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <33CA6DEC.22000B34@swbell.net>, Paulhc  <paulhc@swbell.net> wrote:
>What is the Apple III that I've been seeing in some posts?  

   Apple's first (of many) failed attempt to dominate in the business
market. Basically, it started with a ][+ but added many useful
features like easy access to memory past the first 64K, per-character
coloring, loadable text fonts, relocatable zeropage, the beginnings of
double Hi|Lores, a nicely modular OS that was stripped down to become
ProDOS (and the better features finally reappearing in GS/OS many
years later), and a bunch more stuff. Originally appeared in 1980.

   The Apple III was plagued by two major problems: (1) really flakey
initial designs (some sources I've seen said that they had nearly 100%
Dead On Arrival rate initially) caused by poor engineering design and
faults not adequately dealt with. (2) The Apple II could run in Apple
II "compatability" mode, but with that on, Apple II programs could not
take advantage of any Apple III features-- special circuitry was added
to specifically prevent that. This was because even back then, Apple
was trying to kill the goose laying the golden eggs: the Apple
II. Fracturing the market between II and III-only programs to shaft
the users and programmers was a bad idea.

   For example, imagine if the GS had circuitry so that only GS/OS (or
P16 initially) programs could access the Ensoniq chip or the SHR
screen...  there were a number of darn fine DOS 3.3 and ProDOS 8-based
GS stuff that are damn fun, and if the programmers were forced to use
the slower and memory-hogging OSs, things would have been much less
useful. But, blame Apple for making the original GS underpowered,
under-memoried, lacking a powerful OS initially, and with a buggy ROM
00.

   [More information on this is in Steve Weyerich's Apple II history
at http://www.hypermall.com/History/AH07.html ]

   Unfortunately, Apple saw the bad reaction to the Apple III as
stemming from users's dislike of all the cool features they added, so
the //e as released in 1983 was barely an update of the ][+ with fewer
chips, more memory, and a 80-column card slot. They refused to use any
of the damn useful things like easy memory-access, but programmers had
to jump thru hoops to use bank-switched memory or slot cards. Many
years after the III, a fair number of the features made it back into
the II, rather than immediately, which would have been a much better
plan.

>2: No other versions of the III like the Apple ][ (Apple ][+, ][e,
>//c, gs, etc.)

   There's the III and III+. The Plus came out later and fixed the
flakey hardware problems, but apparently *still* tried to shaft Apple
II users and programmers. It sold better, but not well enough for
people to take serious note of it. The GS handidly beats the III and
III+, technologically, didn't have extremely flakey hardware, and
*didn't* shaft previous users. And it succeeded.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
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