Re: Mac users are feeling our pain :)

["N.N. Thayer" <nnthayer@hotmail.com>]

I honestly think that the Apple II could have evolved into something
much greater than the Apple IIGS, and much earlier on, if only
management had been willing.  There are some quotes from a Steve
Wozniak interview with BYTE Magazine in December of '84, well after the
introduction of the Mac, that I think are appropriate here:

WOZNIAK: The Apple II was kept out of the business market to keep the
III going, to give our users only one choice. We wanted to make the III
the success it hadn't become and that it deserved. Unfortunately, we
made sure that the Apple II was nowhere close to the market that the
[IBM] PC took. We made sure the Apple II was not allowed to have a hard
disk or more than 128K of memory. At a time when outside companies had
very usable schemes for adding up to a megabyte of memory, we came up
with a method of adding 64K to an Apple IIe, which was more difficult
to use and somewhat limited. We refused to acknowledge any of the good
80-column cards that were in the outside world - only ours, which had a
lot of problems. At one point during the Apple III development, I wrote
some fast disk routines for our Pascal system on the II. And I got a
lot of flak from Apple III engineers who felt that they shouldn't go on
the Apple II. Nothing on the II should be allowed to run as fast or
faster than the Apple III. That was the thinking that stuck with the
company for three solid years. It was unfortunate the way things worked
out, because we probably put $100 million in advertising, promotion,
and research and development into a product that was 3 percent of our
revenues. In that same time frame, think what we could have done to
improve the Apple II, or how much could have been done by Apple to give
us products in IBM's market.

***

WOZNIAK: The thinking on the III was very much like a religion in that
it could only be done one way - our way. We made it very difficult for
outside developers, instead of providing all the information as we did
with the Apple II.

BYTE: Has that attitude changed now?

WOZNIAK: No. It's still the most negative thing in our whole company.
And it will be for years.