Re: Apple III question (couldn't find a 3 group to ask)

[Roger Johnstone <rojaws@orcon.net.nz>]

In <41011576$1_5@corp.newsgroups.com> exegete@nunya.biz wrote:
> 
> Roger Johnstone wrote:
> 
>> In <40fefc6d_5@corp.newsgroups.com> exegete@nunya.biz wrote:
>> 
>>>Tadapope wrote:
>>>
>>>>The Apple III was among other things
>>>>what killed the Apple II - Woz
>>>
>>>That's hardly likely, given that the /// was killed less than a year 
>>>after the IIe was released, and at about the same time that the //c 
>>>was  released.
>>>
>>>Roy
>> 

quote from Woz:
http://apple2history.org/museum/articles/byte8412/byte8412.html

> I didn't see that quote in the above link. Perhaps I scanned the 
> article  too quickly, but again. I didn't see that quote there.

There's a link at the bottom of that page to a second page, where the 
interview continues. The last section deals with the Apple III versus 
the Apple II.

>> My take on this is that because Apple was concentrating on the Apple 
>> III  they basically stopped ALL Apple II development for a couple of 
>> years. 
> 
> Agreed. But WHEN? And what of the Super II? It was basically a IIe, 
> and  someone developed it. As I recall, it could have been released in 
> `81.  So, SOME developement was being done.
>
>> Eventually they came out with the IIe, but it was still deliberately 
>> hobbled so that it wouldn't compete with the III, 
> 
> How so? The memory? But we've seen that both Apple and third parties 
> were able to extend the II's memory range. I've been assured that the 
> II  could never had had a memory mangagement as the /// did because of 
> the  original design of the II. I suspect the same is true of the 
> video.

This is another quote from Woz from that interview:

"If you looked at our advertising and R&D dollars, everything we did 
here was done first on the III, if it was business related. Then maybe 
we'd consider doing a sub-version on the II. To make sure there was a 
good boundary between the two machines, anything done on the II had to 
be done on a lower level than on the III. Only now are we discovering 
that good solutions can be implemented on the II.

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 iot of problems."

Now this only really applies to the first year of the Apple IIe of 
course, when the III was still alive. After they gave up on the III they 
turned back to the II e.g. making a controller card to allow the Apple 
III ProFile drives to be used on a II.

> The Mac was announced less than six months after the IIe's release.
> 
> My point is, that many have telescoped those years, and ignored that 
> there was development for the II. Did Apple focus on other machines? 
> Yes. Did Apple largely (but not totally) ignore extending and 
> enhancing  the II? Yes. Did the /// kill the II? No. The Mac did. And 
> it took the  Mac 2-3 years to do so! The Mac only began to be 
> successful with the  Plus model, and that was 1.5 - 2 years after 
> January 1984!
>
> When the IIgs was released (Consider this!) It was the first color GUI 
> that Apple had. It was the first ADB machine. It was the first machine 
> designed by Apple that could use more than 4 megs of RAM. It was the 
> most advanced sound that Apple had ever released.
> 
> More than 3 years after the /// died!!
> 
> So, again, did the /// hurt the II? Yes. Did it kill it? The facts 
> doen't support that claim.
> 
> Roy

Did anyone claim it did?

Tadapope wrote:

>>>>The Apple III was among other things
>>>>what killed the Apple II - Woz

Some of the other things that killed the Apple II were Apple, the Apple 
III, the Lisa, the Macintosh and the IBM PC. Among other things.

-- 
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
http://vintageware.orcon.net.nz/
________________________________________________________________________
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