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Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

Mike Willegal wrote:

Michael J. Mahon wrote:


Michael J. Mahon wrote:


David Empson wrote:

<snip>

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 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.
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. 

I certainly agree that there are wonderful benefits to a strong
architectural interface, as opposed to a "free-for-all" ROM listing
and schematic!

But, given the state of the art in the late-1970s-to-mid 1980s, it
was more important to throw open the doors and windows and see what
came of it than to presume that one had intuitively arrived at the
proper set of functionality and restrict users' creativity.

The result was a wonderful blooming of hardware and software
advances for personal computers--and more importantly, a bloom
of visions of what personal computing could become (besides storing
recipes and printing mailing lists ;-).

As is to be expected in the rhythm of things, the period of carefree
experimentation was followed by a period of dying off of virtually all
early "dead end" platforms and consolidation on a (slightly) newer but
evolvable standard that permitted the growth of a huge market in PCs.

Today we live on the high plateau attained by the creative momentum from
that volatile, expansive era--but a plateau nonetheless, constrained by
the many standards and complexities that enable the market.

As evolution continues, we can expect another revolution in computing,
in which the PC platform will play the role of the rigid mainframe in
the previous scenario, and new visions will emerge to reseed creativity
and make our "high plateau" seem like a valley.

The average life of a plateau seems to be 20-40 years, so it might be
soon.  ;-)  Of course, we don't have a sequel to Moore's "Law" to power
the engines this time--though perhaps massive parallelism might be
enough to do the trick...

-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."