Re: Apple ///?

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

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

>In article <1APR199702301346@vax2.concordia.ca>,
>Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>>    The Apple III was not meant as an immediate replacement, but certainly
>>an eventual one. Development on the Apple II line was put on hold during
>>the years the III existed, notice the gap in years from the Apple II Plus
>>(1979) until the Apple IIe (1983)? Furthermore, if Apple truly planned to
>>support both lines, why did they purposely cripple the Apple II emulation
>>mode on the III? Why didn't they release an enhanced Apple II model then?
>>They were trying to discourage interest in the Apple II, that's why.
>
>OK so that means that since the Corvette design didn't change from 1968
>to 1982, Chevrolet was trying to discourage interest in the Corvette?
>Interesting. I think it was more of a case of if it's not broken, don't
>fix it. Then when it came time to update the box and add features, out
>came the //e.

    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.

    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.

>As far as a replacement for the II, I think that was never the intention.
>Apple has always had low end boxes and high end boxes, which can run a lot of
>the same software. For example, the Mac SE and II came out at roughly the
>same time. One had fewer features and cost less, the other more features and
>cost more. But a Mac II can run the software an SE can and more.

    No...? Well how about this quote from Steve Wozinak in a 1985
interview from Byte magazine:

"When we came out with the Apple III, the engineering staff cancelled
every Apple II engineering program that was ongoing, in expecation of
the Apple III's success. _Every single one_ was cancelled. We really
perceived the Apple II would not last six months. [...] To make sure
there was a good boundary between the two machines, anything done on
the II had to be done at a lower level than on the III. [...] We made
sure the Apple II was not allowed to have a hard disk or more than 128K
of memory."

    Gee, that talk about creating boundaries, lower levels and not
allowing certain features (to make one project line stand above the
other) sounds like it well applied to the Apple IIgs and Macintosh.
Seems that mindset never changed at Apple. I can understand creating
a low and high product in the _same_ product line (like your example
of the Mac SE vs Mac II) but to go at great length to hold back a
separate product line so it can not ever be equal or better than the
other?

>>    That's a fair number (more than I originally thought) but peanuts
>>compared to the number of Apple II machines sold (6-8 million was it?).
>>I'm sure even pre-Mac Pluses sold topped that number. It's a significant
>>amount, but still few enough where III's are not all that common.
>
>You mean 6-8 million from '77 to '93? It only makes sense to compare how
>many IIs sold during the III's lifespan. I'd have to locate my Apple II
>Guide or something to find that kind of info.

    Yup, all Apple II's sold ever. I was just using that number because
the original poster asked why he had never heard of, let alone seen, an
Apple III. If you have 100,000 of one thing floating around, and 6-8
million of another, which are you more likely to come across?

>>    I just read they laid off something like 4000-5000 workers a few weeks
>>back. Come to think of it, each time I see something about Apple mentioned
>>in the business section of the newspaper, it's more bad-news. I'm still
>>watching to see what happens, but I'm wouldn't buy stock in the company. ;)
>
>They're getting seriously harsh treatment in the press. Someone over in
>comp.sys.mac posted a bunch of bad press stories dating clear back to '85.
>That's nothing new, and the company still keeps going. Check out the
>"dose of reality" section on Apple's page for another point of view.

    Things have drastically changed from 1985. For one thing, 90%+ (is it
more now?) of the computer industry wasn't dominated by one single type of
machine. Years ago there were dozens of different kinds of computers around,
today there's basically just PCs and Macs (and Macs make up only a small
number compared to PC clones). It's gotten to the point where PCs are now
a computer standard, while Macs are merely an alternative choice for those
who don't want to follow the rest of the crowd. Personally I wish there was
a second alternative.

>>of (at one time if you bought Apple hardware, you _knew_ it was quality,
>>but today they're cutting back and throwing any junk at the users in hopes
>>that they'll be computer "newbies" and not know any better). There is
>>a whole list of reasons why I don't see a future for Apple, and there
>>most likely won't be, unless things drastically change...
>
>Actually the newbies who don't know any better are the ones who end up with
>PCs since they tend to buy what salesdroids push on 'em. And that isn't
>Apple.

    I agree, again it's people just blindly following the crowd. Still,
Apple figures the newbies who do make it over to their side were going
to get junky PC parts anyway, so they can slip the same junk parts onto
them without them knowing or even caring really. Apple claims this is
all part of "cost cutting", I call it not giving a damn.

>The big stores usually put their pitiful selection of Apple boxes on
>a back wall or in another obscure place.

    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.

>Then there are places like the local Computer City which has a password
>protected screen saver on the Macs so you can't even look at them.
>Utterly ridiculous.

    Same story here. :)

>Apple strongly discouraged people from writing half assed native apps which
>ran under ProDOS 8 and used IIgs features, but people did it anyway.

    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.

>They took a more hard line approach with II emulation on IIIs I guess.
>As far as memory requirements, you gotta stay in the right time frame.
>In the III era, the main reason for having 64K was to be able to load the
>version of BASIC which isn't built in. There's a reason why 16K memory cards
>were called language cards. Since the emulation boot disk let you choose which
>BASIC to use, there goes the most common reason to have 64K.

    You still can't run ProDOS on an Apple III, which required 64K. Of
course ProDOS didn't exist until 1983 and came from SOS itself, but you
get the idea of how limiting memory access hurt it. Besides, many games
and programs started using the 16K of Language Card space by even around
the time of the Apple III, so 64K was almost a standard. No reason to
block it in hardware so you couldn't even program around it.

>Clock speed is one thing when it comes to emulation using the host machine's
>native features, and memory expansion too, but stuff like supporting lower
>case chars when the emulated box does not is overstepping the bounds of
>what you can call emulation. That's like calling the hybrid ProDOS 8 IIgs
>apps //e programs. They're nothing of the sort since they won't run on a //e.

    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.

    How about this, if Apple II Plus users with 48K and 40 columns
couldn't run such and such a program because it was written to use
64K and 80 columns on the Apple III, wouldn't that have helped
encourage the II user towards upgrading their machine to run that
software? But then I guess Apple didn't want to encourage people
to use their II's, they wanted them to buy their latest product.

>>    How about that and not adding more memory to the motherboard, not
>>allowing anymore than 4 MB of DMA memory in the expansion slot, never
>>adding stereo output or a digitizer input. Not adding a measly extra
>>64K of RAM for the Ensoniq chip for that matter. How about leaving the
>>graphics limited to only 16 colors per scanline, 200 lines vertical
>>resolution, no internal hardrive/floppy drives (or motherboard support
>>for FDHD SuperDrives or SCSI). I could probably name a dozen more ways
>>it was left crippled. Even price for that matter, why did Apple keep
>>the price of the IIgs so high for years, while dropping the prices on
>>Macs? Like I once said before, if the engineers at Apple couldn't
>>figure out how to add more memory to the motherboard, or how to stick
>>a faster 65C816 on there or update the VGC to support more color
>>depth and resolution, maybe then it's no wonder they're now on the
>>verge of disappearing.
>
>Anachronistic thinking again. Even in '89, when ROM 3 came out, 5 mb was a
>LOT of memory and it cost a LOT of money. Macs topped out at 8 mb in those
>days.

    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?).

>Superdrives barely existed then,

    How difficult would it have been to replace the IWM with a SWIM?
There wouldn't have been a compatibility issue, since you'd still be
able to hook up the standard 800K drives. As new technologies came
out, Apple just plain out refused to pass them onto the GS.

>and SCSI was available. I'm guessing that the RAMfast owning readers
>would be a tad unhappy if they were locked into using a rev C speed SCSI
>port if SCSI were built in.

    Seeing that the Apple High-Speed SCSI board came out only a year
after the ROM 3, you can bet they had it in development before then.
It wouldn't have been difficult putting that (then) upcoming DMA
design board onto the motherboard. The IIgs sorely needed a mass
storage device, about as much as a Macintosh, otherwise it was just
a fancy Apple IIe. The thing is Apple didn't want to do a thing to
change the IIgs, not because they couldn't figure out how, but because
they did not want to.

>Superdrive cards came out, and didn't sell worth a hoot.

    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.

>Maybe the sales of VOCs and superdrive cards were part of the reason why
>the ethernet card never came out.

    The Ethernet card never came out because Apple managment decided they
wanted all Apple II development halted, and no futher products to be sold.
There was no logic in killing the board when it was fully completed and
even the software support was done.

>As far as updated features go, some people have said in this group that the
>majority of IIgses ended up in schools used as fancy //e's. If Apple's
>marketing bore that out, it's not hard to see why they would consider the
>existing features adequate and not sink dollars into updating 'em.

    The reason they were used as fancy IIe's maybe had to do with the
fact out of the box you got a crippled machine. In fact out of the
box all you got _was_ basically a fancy IIe. It was up to you to add
extra memory, purchase a 3.5 drive or hardrive. If the original Mac 128
never got updated, but could emulate older Apple II software, what do
you think school's would be using them for?

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca