Re: Apple ///?

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (vax2.concordia.ca)]

In article shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) writes...

>Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>
>[serious snippage since I agree with bjbear, woulda-coulda-shoulda is
> pointless at this point                                             ]

    True enough, Apple is never going to bring back to the Apple II
and all the complaining in the world about the past isn't going to
change that. Though at least it's worthwhile acknowledging and admitting
mistakes made in the past, otherwise the same mistakes get repeated in
the present. From threads like this one, I seriously get the feeling
that many actually believe Apple Computer has done everything right
from the beginning right until this day. If that were true, they
wouldn't be struggling to stay alive as they're doing now. 

>>    According to history, the origins of the Apple IIe go back to at
>>least 1980 ("Diana" project) and it seems the design was finished in
>>1981. The project was purposely put on the side because of the Apple
>>III. The IIe was released in 1983 _not_ because it was time for a new
>>update, but because the Apple III had flopped and they needed to jump
>>back to the Apple II again, which they had ignored all those years.
>
>Apple III production continued into mid '84. It and the //c were concurrently
>in production for a while. I still have seen nothing to indicate that the
>III was intended to become a home/school system. Does any software exist
>for it which isn't business oriented? Naturally Apple wanted a replacement
>for the II in that market, since ][ pluses weren't really up to the task.

    Apple III production came to a dead stop in the first quarter of 1984.
I should point out the Apple IIc was introduced the very same month the
Apple III line was discontinued (April 1984). Maybe Apple dealers were
still selling them after that point (to clear out stock), but they were
not concurrently in production. That only applies to the Apple IIe.

    As for what software is written for a computer, that is up to people
and companies out there, not Apple Computer. They do have an influence
though, if you don't support your own product, neither will 3rd parties
quite often (as was the case with the Apple IIgs in later years).

>>    You truly think there was no need to enhance the design of the
>>Apple II Plus? The keyboard alone was in desparate need of changing,
>>people wanted/needed a full ASCII keyboard with simple things you'd
>>take for granted on another machine, like lowercase or cursor keys.
>
>Well if we're talking '81, how many other systems were around to compare
>the ][ plus to?

    A fair number even at that point. How about the original IBM PC
for starters, it came out in 1981. Even the Commodore PET had been
out a number of years and supported lowercase.

>That would be called finding a market niche. Back to cars again, Chevrolet
>designed the Chevette to never be equal or better than the Corvette. And
>they had matching price tags. Regardless of whether that was the intention,
>having different product lines with different capabilities and prices to
>match is perfectly sensible.

    We're not talking about cars, but computers. If I'm buying a product
from a computer company, I wouldn't want it to be purposely crippled or 
held back in technological advancement because the company wants to play 
"favorites" with another line they happen to sell. The way Apple treated 
the Apple II, you'd think Apple had control over a competitor company, 
rather than something that was their own product. If that is the case then 
just sell one computer. I'm sure Apple wanted to, but the Apple II remained 
a cash-cow for funding the Macintosh. Once it served it's purpose, that was 
the end. That is not called a niche, that is called taking advantage and 
screwing your customers.

>>    Not too mention it's just a shelf or two, which brings up another
>>point, and that is that Mac software is not as available as PC software
>>in stores. You have to mostly go through mail-order vendors to get what
>>you want (like Apple II software), or have stores specially order it
>>for you.
>
>Here's my comment on that: I own a laserdisc player, and discs for it are
>a little hard to find compared to VHS tapes. But the picture and sound
>beat the living snot out of VHS. So I consider it worth my while to find
>films on laserdisc rather than settling for VHS.

    That may be true for laserdisc and VHS tapes, but not a good analogy
for PC and Mac software. One may be more difficult to find in stores (and
there are far fewer titles available in Mac format that PC) but there is
no day/night difference in quality. We're not talking 1985 here, where
the Mac version comes in a nice easy-to-use GUI form with fancy graphics,
while the PC version is done out of text screens and made for a monochrome
screen. I not only find most PC software equal (I have Photoshop on my PC,
it looks and works like the Mac one for example) but often better. What if
I want entertainment software? There's hardly any of that on the Mac side,
and those few titls that do exist, hardly compare to PC games.

>>    One reason was to program on the metal and gain more speed. Maybe
>>they wouldn't have been forced to go this route had Apple updated the
>>GS with a faster 65C816 or other enhancements. They just left the GS
>>relatively untouched from 1986 until 1992, so people had to take matters
>>into their own hands. That meant 3rd party upgrades and doing whatever
>>you had to do in order to squeeze preformance out of the existing CPU
>>through software.
>
>This was mostly in the early days when ProDOS 16 was the native OS. It
>sucked so people made apps run under ProDOS 8 instead. These apps started
>to vanish after GS/OS came out. Apple did screw up by not getting a real
>OS out sooner. Kinda like how it is with Powermacs now. They came out early
>in '94, and only at the end of this year will the OS made for them start
>to appear.

    GS/OS helped, but the machine was still far too slow. People continued
to have to rely on programming tricks to get graphics to move and get any
kind of speed out of the machine. GS/OS didn't help Brutal Deluxe in 1995,
they had to come out with their own special/complex routines in order to
get their Convert 3200 as speedy as it is. They also did the best they could
with LemminGS, but you still need a hardware accelerator. Many developers
_left_ the Apple IIgs world because Apple refused to give the machine decent
speed and other enhancements, or otherwise support it.

    If IBM hadn't licensed PC clones, then left the original machine running
at 4.77 MHz with little or no enhancements, do you think the world with be
using PC's today? Incidentally, when Apple refused to update the GS, many
3rd party companies were interested in doing souped up Apple IIgs clones
(i.e. Laser) but Apple refused to license them and threatened to sue if
any were to surface. Laser even had a GS clone prototype built I recall.

>>    The thing is many users added lowercase character ROMs and 80 columns
>>text boards to their Apple II Pluses during that era. Apple could have
>>written (and did) the first emulation boot disk to act _exactly_ like an
>>out of the box II Plus, but why the need to block access to anything more
>>with the use of extra hardware? That meant when things like 80 columns,
>>more memory, etc were common on the II Plus, you could _not_ run those
>>programs that required them when using the III.
>
>Apple isn't in the habit of emulating things which come from third parties.
>Since Apple itself didn't support lowercase, 80 columns, etc, you can't
>expect their emulation to do so. If for no other reason, these things
>were nonstandard at the time. Of course, a //e emulator, had it existed
>would have had //e style lowercase and 80 columns.

    Alright, you have a good point. However, why couldn't they just write
the emulation boot disk to be limited through software? Why did they need
to _block_ access to the advanced features through hardware? By the time
people would have written their own emulation boot disks, the Apple IIe
would have been around. When the Lisa 2 came out, I don't remember Apple
adding hardware to block access to it's advanced features when emulating
a Macintosh. 

>>    Who said you would have needed 5 MB then, 2 MB would have been fine
>>for most persons. I still don't understand why it was affordable and cost
>>effective to put that memory on Macintosh motherboards, but not Apple IIgs
>>boards. In most cases they were the exact same chips, didn't several Macs
>>use 1MBx1 DRAMs on the main board? It was absolutely absurd that GSes in
>>1986 shipped with 256K on the main board when Macintosh Pluses came with
>>1 MB on theirs (how much native GS software ran on 256K, how about trying
>>something close to nill?).
>
>Mac Pluses have zero memory built in, only four SIMM slots. And I heard
>someone say once that 1 -> 4 mb cost $1400 on a Plus in those days. And
>Apple did start bundling memory cards, so you had 512K at least. The dealer
>where I got mine started doing that on their own before Apple did. Up until
>system 3.0 or so, 512K was a pretty decent amount of memory. In '86, a IIgs
>box would have cost $1500 or more if it had had 1 mb built in.

    So it wasn't built-in on the motherboard, Apple still bundled those
four 256K SIMMs inside every Macintosh Plus shipped. They could have,
and certainly should have, put that much memory on the Apple IIgs board.
Apple IIgs's weren't exactly cheap, and for the price they cost, they
should have included that amount of memory as standard. I don't believe
adding more memory would have raised the price (if they were _already_
inflated, there would have been no need to raise the cost more, but of
course Apple is, and always has been, greedy and petty). You didn't even
get a 3.5 drive bundled with the GS, it was just a CPU box, keyboard
and mouse. Of every single review I read in 1986, each stated the GS
was highly overpriced. It's high cost scared many potential buyers
away. I still have not heard a logical reason why the price of the IIgs
stayed relatively the same from 1986 until 1992 while Mac prices dropped.

    GS's did not ship with 512K until mid 1988. When I picked up my IIgs
from the dealer in late January of 1988, I had to purchase my memory
board separately (an extra $150 cost). I still had to boost it up to
768K to run a number of titles out there, and before the year's end,
it became apparent that 1.25 MB was necessary for a growing number of
titles.

>>    They only came out in late 1991 and at a cost of something like $150,
>>plus another $300 for the external SuperDrive, is it any wonder? At this
>>point it time it was the same cost to purchase a SCSI board and small
>>hardrive.
>
>When unidisk 3.5s came out, the card was $70 and the drive had a $499 list
>price. They sold fairly well. Plus the list on the superdrive card was
>$109 I'm pretty sure, as for the HS SCSI card.

    Um, that was in 1985. We're talking about the SuperDrive around 1992.
Who wanted to pay > $500 for a 1.44 MB floppy drive setup, especially at
a time when 800K 3.5 disks were still the standard (name one program that
ever shipped on a 1.44MB ProDOS disk) and no drivers existed to allow you
to read/write MS-DOS or High Density HFS diskettes at the time. There was
no point, all you gained was a slight bit of extra storage and you could
buy a SCSI hardrive for the same cost. The price list for a SuperDrive 
card was $129 actually.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca