Re: Happy 30th Birthday to Disk ][ and Apple DOS

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <34166fcd-a44e-40dc-9fa3-e510c928dfbc@26g2000hsk.googlegroups.com>,
mdj  <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Jul 10, 11:15=A0pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
>
>> Dunno about that either - both PET and TRS-80 had floppy disk storage
>> too, as well as a number of CP/M computers from that time.  CP/M even
>> *required* disk storage of some kind. =A0No, what put the Apple ][ ahead 
>in
>> the competition was its open architecture, which created a third party
>> market which soon made lots of hardware and software available for the ][
>.
>> And the entry of Apple ][ into the business market was due to one single
>> software package: VisiCalc ....
>
>But really, the Disk ][ was fast, simple, and therefore cheap. The
>controller was not only industry changing, but a work of art.

Sure it was!  But the Apple II didn't become popular mainly due to its
relatively cheap disk drives, other factors were more important IMHO.


>> Apple DOS didn't even have a decent command line! Only a very restricted
>> syntax of the command line was allowed by Apple DOS - other needed input
>> parameters had to be obtained though a user dialogue by the application
>> itself, or perhaps through some data (text) file. Compare this with the
>> very flexible command line interface of CP/M (which was directly inherited
>> by MS-DOS): after the name of the executable file you could type almost
>> anything you wanted. CP/M and MS-DOS didn't object, it simply passed it
>> on to the application and then it was up to the application to try to make
>> sense of the command line, and to determine whether it was legal or illegal.
>
>It's a shame this was never fixed - 10 years later the Apple II
>'prompt' had much the same limitations.

That's the perils of "backwards compatibility".  ProDOS inherited pretty
much of Apple DOS's command line syntax.

>Matt


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