Re: Sudoku puzzle solver for Apple II

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:
> In article <NpidnWmquZS-5ijZnZ2dnUVZ_qOdnZ2d@comcast.com>,
> Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>
> A 6502 assembly language programmer using 65C02 specific ops would be
> compared to one who uses an original 6502 and there utilizes the
> undocumented 6502 ops which certainly will fail on a 65C02.  And for
> the same reason: marginal speed and space advantages.

An interesting comparison.

While quite different in circumstance (since, at least early in the
cycle one might assume that the legitimate extended variant of an old
standard will itself become the "standard"), I do agree that the results
of such "standard-splintering" events is quite similar.  They fragment
the market with potentially negative results.

An example I am too familiar with is Appleworks.  By version 3.0, it
was the most widely used integrated package in the world, and had
become a "platform" for applications in its own right.  Then, as the
Apple II market was losing momentum, two new versions were introduced
(4 and 5), and, while they never became the dominant version, they did
serve to splinter the Appleworks market, so that the cohesion and
synergy was effectively lost.  It was all downhill from there.

Of course, the Appleworks community was destined to decline anyway
as the hardware platform fell behind, but the Appleworks "improvements"
actually hastened the disintegration of its community.

In a world where models become obsolete and are either retired or
replaced by newer models, the older standard simply vanishes from
the stage, and the "evolution with backward compatibility" model
works well enough.

But in the case of retrocomputing, older models *never* disappear,
so writing for the lowest common denominator *where practical*
should be the rule.

-michael

Fast Sudoku solver for Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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