Re: What's an Apple II

[philip@labtam.oz.au (Philip Stephens)]

Alan Donovan writes:

>Could somebody please tell me what is the difference between an Apple II
>and other Apples (Macs, PowerMacs, Performas)?

  *Heh Heh*  It's funny, but I never thought it possible that someone
might not know what an Apple II is.  No offense meant to Alan, of course!

  Okay, a brief history lesson.  The Apple II was the computer that made
Apple Inc. famous.  It bears no resemblance to a Macintosh in any shape
or form, and predated the first Macintosh by several years.  It was, as
I understand it, one of the first really popular personal computers.  It
is primitive by today's standards, but it was pretty impressive for it's
day.
  Apple Inc. created a number of different Apple II models over the years:
the Apple II+, Apple //e (e for "enhanced"), the Apple //c (c for "compact"),
Apple //c+, and most recently the Apple //GS (gs for "graphics and sound").
Until a few months ago the Apple //e and Apple //GS were still in
production, but Apple Inc. finally decided to concentrate on the Macintosh
range instead.

  All Apple II's, excepting the Apple //GS, are 8-bit machines; the
Apple //GS is an 8/16-bit machine.  Out of the box they didn't offer much
in the way of graphics and sound, and didn't run all that fast compared
to today's machines, but they had two big strengths:

  1. There was heaps of high-quality software available for them.
  2. They had 8 expansion slots for all manner of peripheral cards:
     printer cards, modem cards, sound cards, floppy drive cards,
     hard drive cards, RAM cards...to name just a few.

  None of the Apple II's, excepting the Apple //GS again, had a
Macintosh-like windows interface.  A version of BASIC called Applesoft
was built-in, but not much else.  The original disk operating system (DOS)
was pretty primitive and could only handle 5.25" floppy disks formatted
to a whopping 140K!  ProDOS came later and could handle 3.5" floppys and
hard drives.  The Apple //GS started off with ProDOS 16 then migrated
to GS/OS.

  The Apple //GS is rather special in that it's kinda like a cross between
an Apple II and a Macintosh, in that it runs all Apple II software, but
also has a Macintosh-like windows interface and toolbox in ROM.  But
internally it is nothing like a Macintosh, and most Apple //GS users
probably wouldn't want it to be compared to one :-)




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