Re: Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Feb 1, 12:28 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> 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.

It's a great example of excessive minimisation; they clearly failed to
recognise that peripheral cards were a user-installed part, not
engineer installed!

> 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.  ;-)

Indeed. It's also interesting that the industry (particularly in
software) still hasn't learned many of these lessons :-)

Matt