Michael J. Mahon wrote:
The original MAC had very limited HW expansion capabilities. Access to the HW was through Apple supplied drivers. Almost no HW documenation was needed. The software was a modern design that relied on API's. The combination was intended to provide Apple with the opportunity to update SW and HW without having to worry about breaking existing applications. They only needed to support legacy APIs. A lot of this was driven by the trouble Apple had in maintaining backward compatibility in the II series. There were litterally dozens of "well known" routines in the Apple II ROM that had to stay at a specific address or any number of applications would break.Michael J. Mahon wrote:David Empson wrote:Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:Ensor wrote:"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote: > Apple, in contrast, published *everything* needed to make >software, plug-in cards, and even more computers!So, you're saying that the Atari Technical manuals I have not 6 feet awayfrom me are figments of my imagination? :-)True they weren't shipped with the machine, but had to be bought seperately,but they contain full schematics, operating system listings etc....By the time of the XL/XE series machines Atari had stopped publishing suchmanuals, but then again so had Apple etc.They *never* stopped making all info available on the Apple II line. It was automatically included with the Apple II and II+. Around the time of the //e (1984+), as the typical user profile shifted toward "application users" instead of "programmer/enthusiasts", the provided documentation became more "user manual"-oriented--but full technical documentation was still available separately.Apple started to reduce the level of detail by the time the IIgs was released (1986). There are no official ROM listings for any part of the IIgs firmware, nor for the IIc+, but they did publish schematics and most other technical details. The second edition of the IIc Technical Reference doesn't contain any ROM listings (even for the original IIc), but the first edition did have ROM listsing for the "UniDisk" IIc firmware, and I think I've seen a supplement which lists at least one other revision.I think the mid-1980s marks the turning of the "open" tide at Apple, for numerous reasons related both to market changes and management changes.(None of Apple's published firmware listings include Applesoft BASIC, since that code is copyrighted by Microsoft.)Of course, Applesoft was one of the first things that the community reverse-engineered and documented, so the fact that Apple was bound by licensing agreements did not seriously hamper its exploitation.I'm not sure what their policy was with the Apple /// and Lisa, but I'm not aware of any publically available ROM listings or schematics of any Mac (no point - it wouldn't fit with the general philosophy).Both were extremely "closed" in comparison the the Apple II.
The original "Inside Macintosh" documentation for these APIs was extremely well done. Basically the "Inside Macintosh" documentation set the state of the art for technical documention. There was no need for ROM listings, and in fact ROM listings would have enabled software engineers to bypass the APIs and create all kinds of problems with backward compatibility for future generation machines.
Time would prove that the closed system concept had some merit as can be seen by the success of the I-MAC line. However the original implementation, without SCSI, USB and Firewire technology, was way too restrictive.
Regards, Mike Willegal
The Apple /// was apparently kept closed in the mistaken hope that it would encorage only "legitimate" developers of "business" apps, as opposed to the free-for-all in the Apple II world. So much for that idea... As it turns out, volume is volume. ;-)So for the Apple II, the details and examples were there from the beginning (the Red Book and the WozPak, for example)--just when they needed to be there. I've often said that the Apple II was the last personal computer for which all the documentation needed to completely understand its hardware and software weighed less than the machine. ;-) (The Apple //e shipped into the 1990s.)The IIgs certainly wouldn't qualify on that measure. I needed a moderately large shelf to hold my nearly complete set of IIgs technical documentation.Exactly...I should have clarified that I was talking about the 8-bit Apples, not the GUI- and tool-based IIgs. -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."