mdj wrote:
On Feb 1, 1:56 am, Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:Or, decades later, people have forgotten or even never knew that there were home computers before the "IBM PC". Again, it's because the previous computers are dwarfed by the arrival of that computer, fused with many people having arrived after that point. It doesn't mean there weren't small computers before IBM came along, just that few remember.It really didn't help that Apple themselves tried very hard to forget that they made any computers before the Macintosh. It's a great historical irony that whilst Apple strived to build the ultimate computing 'appliance', the industry was commoditised by a machine architecture that owes more than a little homage to the Apple II
Absolutely. The IBM engineers that designed the PC looked long and hard at the Apple II and its runaway success and copied freely when they recognized a good thing. The peripheral bus is a prominent example of both getting it right (the bus itself) and wrong (no motherboard slot decoding, no plug'n'play ROM convention). Of course, the march of technology has rendered those deficits a non-issue, but in the early 1980s, the extra chips per card and software configuration problems were a real cost. And it is very interesting that the Apple II was the result of Woz wanting to get the most fun potential and future-proofing as possible for the smallest number of chips. ;-) -michael ******** Note new website URL ******** NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."