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

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, mdj wrote:

> On Jul 10, 11:15 pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

> But really, the Disk ][ was fast, simple, and therefore cheap. The
> controller was not only industry changing, but a work of art.
That's ambiguous.

If it was so "industry changing" then everyone else would have leaped
to the design.  And nobody did.  A handful of companies did use GCR 
formatting, Commodore comes immediately to mind, but they sure didn't use
such a simple controller.  And of course to balance the controller design,
Apple had to have special drives manufactured, because a standard drive
had "too much circuitry".  That's a liability, and even into the age of 
the Mac the non-standard drives were a negative thing for Apple, since
it kept the cost high.

No other companies needed Apple to tell them they should have cheaper
hardware.  Cost was a limiting factor in the early days of small 
computers, but so were lots of other factors.  The cost kept people
like me from getting an Apple II back then (I had to settle for an OSI
Superboard), but it was still so early that there was a limited pool
of people who would buy a computer, even if the cost did drop.

   Michael