Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

["Payton Byrd" <plbyrd@bellsouth.no.spam.net>]

"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message loidnRH2VNP8i4nbnZ2dnUVZ_s3inZ2d@comcast.com">news:loidnRH2VNP8i4nbnZ2dnUVZ_s3inZ2d@comcast.com...
> 
> I guess being the "underdog" confers the right to fight dirty...  ;-)
> 

Um... no.  I think this is actually to the point: most people don't actually root for the underdog unless the underdog is clearly better.  Up until Mac OS X, that was not even close to being the case for the Macintosh.  The original 128k Mac was useless and by the time the Mac SE was around the Amiga 1000 was out and clearly the tech lead had been lost, and it would stay lost to any number of machines until the Intel-based Mac OS X machines became available.  

But in the 8-bit world, the Apple II was definitely the way to go if you required lots of random expandability and price was not a big consideration.  Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs overpriced the things and so they never acquired the market share that could have been had with just a reasonable price tag for a machine with two disk drives, 128k and a printer.