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The Apple II At 30
turnitover sends us to eWEEK for an appreciation of the Apple II on the 30th anniversary of its shipping. An overview of the history of the Apple II puts it in context. A nice tidbit: how important the floppy drive was to sales. The article quotes Sellam Ismail, the proprietor of VintageTech, which maintains archives of computers, documents, and software: "You could think of the Apple II's importance on two levels — the Woz level and the Steve Jobs level." The former refers to its allure to hackers, and the latter to its appliance-like polish, a first for its time, There is also an interview with Woz, who says, "[A]t the start there were no computers in the home — we had to make the word computer compatible with homes."
What's the big thing that seems to have changed at Apple over 30 years?
In 1977, Apple Computer included the schematics for all of the motherboard and CPU design for the Apple ][.
In 2006, Apple Ceased & Desisted a site for merely linking to a service manual.
Please come back Woz, we miss you.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
My Apple ][ was something that challenged and taught me.
Woz is brilliant and I spend countless hours pouring over the big red book with the fold out schematic of the Apple ][. Not only open source but open hardware too. The Apple ][ was fundamental in my development as a computer programmer.
Computers now have lost the special aspects of the Apple ][... simplicity and understandability.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
As a freethinking Atheist I feel all religions should be banned globally. The quicker religions are banned, the quicker we will achieve peace globally.
As an atheist, I must ask by what means do you hope to achieve such a ban, let alone enforce it? Are you willing to be more tyrannical than Stalin?
Zork, not Zonk. I'm assuming that's a braino, since the 'N' key is nowhere near the 'R' key.
... the graphics in your head.
All those text-only Infocom games had the best graphics
SLM
main() {1;}
Like any geek 30+, I had an AppleII too (in fact, the computer's name was TK2000, a brazilian clone). And I must say that the world of computers were sooo funnier then... Obviously I'm takking from a romantic point of view, where typing 500 lines of BASIC code to save it in a K7 tape (after 3 hours debugging your mistypings) is real fun! I remember a book called "the black book of TK2000" that contained several hard-to-find informations that allowed me to really explore my machine, and the assembly programs that made it read even bugged tapes without errors. :-) And, last but not least, Karateka! :-)))
:-) IRQs, DMAs, conflicts, fun, fun, fun! :-) But since then, everything went downhill (or uphill). From 64Kb to 4Gb of RAM in 10 years...
After that, I had a MSX (I don't know if this japanese computer was famous in other countries, but here in brazil it was) with a single-sided drive, and some years later my first 386SX.
Today, you buy a computer, connect it to your 8Mb internet connection, download a 2Gb game in half an hour and play games that are almost real... You don't need to worry about tapes, typing, basic, anything. It's obviously better... But it's sad too. There's no fun anymore...
Yes, I know I'm getting old... But I really think that I was happy and I didn't knew...
--- Illogical Spock
That's what I love about Linux. I know the hardware is still closed, but one can go into /etc and look at the scripts that control the system - in (almost) human readable form!
/etc could certainly be better and more logically organised!
Now I'm no hardcore hacker (basic bash is as gritty as I get) but it's beautiful that the system is configured by a heap of text files and scripts.
Having said that -
Sort of amazing that this was so long ago. I had an education version of the Apple II (Bell and Howell) with a floppy. If we want to emulate the possibilities of something like this, a real concerted effort at platform development needs to happen. The concept of print graphics (I'm a designer) is not long for the world, and frankly neither is the concept of a personal computer. The platform is the network (sorry Sun you missed it.).
Framing thought around computing is the future, and it is platform independent. Imagine if Google were untied from the server and existed in code or essentially tags. Processing would become a commodity. Processing would again become personal. This is the problem. In 1977 we thought of computing and programming as personal. Information a a personal responsibility. Today we outsource to platform vendors.
Tomorrow we define. Define content. Define a context. And, define a connection scenario.
It was Commodore, not Apple, who released the first true home computer.
It was Commodore, not Apple, who "brought computing to homes" by making their machines affordable.
Lastly, it was the success of Commodore, not Apple's, that made computing mainstream.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
You must have been using a different USCD than I recall. My memory was of swapping disks. Edit, save, swap disks, compile, swap disks, run, ad nauseum. You could arrange certain combinations to live on the same disk, but that combination did not include "Everything you needed to do stuff".
Which meant that when we got a Z80 card in one machine and ran Turbo Pascal, which was just everything-in-one-place, it was like heaven.
I brought my C-64 to school in 1988 and made all the Apple Machines look stupid. Now when I went to College I fell in love with the Mac but always though the Apple II line got too much attention.
Linux = Buddhism (Smaller userbase, approaching state of Nirvana)
Mac = Islam Looks like it's time again for:
Traeger's Law on Advocacy:
"1. Any form of advocacy will lead to an analogy (e.g. computer advocacy and car analogies). These analogies will usually suck.
2. There will be at least one reply a) claiming the opposite, b) offering a 'better' analogy, c) trying to further the analogy to all elements in the field, or d) taking the analogy into minute details. The resulting analogy will usually suck even more."
Examples:
1.
- Macs are like Mercedes, PCs like Fords.
- RISC is like a manual transmission...
2.
a) No, MACS are like Yugos... (note: not an exact opposite)
b) Actually, RISC is like a two-stroke...
- No, a Mac is like a lion, PCs are like fish, because...
c) SUNs... Compaqs... toaster-ovens...
d) The Mac's multitasking is like the Porsches brake-system...
Godwin's Law can be seen as a special case.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I call for a moratorium on Apple fluff pieces during finals week.
You think it's bad now, wait until you're in the workforce. EVERY week is finals week in the real world. *sigh*
call -151
I don't think anyone would argue that the Apple II was technically inferior to the machines that came later from other companies. The Commodore 64 was released five years after the Apple II, that's ages in computer years and features several custom chips for its special features. Apple stuck to the same off-the shelf mentality for a long time, because that's what their customers wanted. The Apple /// was a complete flop, so was the Lisa. People liked their Apple IIs. The Apple IIGS was late to the party, if they had moved in that direction sooner, maybe it would have made a difference, but technical superiority isn't everything in mass marketing. Ask Sony.
... and because they developed an affordable laser printer before anyone else. Not unlike how Apple were the first to develop a fast and affordable floppy system -- engineered by who? W
While the Mac was buoyed by the desktop publishing revolution, the Amiga did manage to capture a niche: video and graphics. Amiga computers are still used today by many video professionals. There is a Video Toaster sitting eight feet from me (and its PC successor, the VT[4], in the box I'm using right now). Unfortunately for Commodore, the potent Amiga / Toaster combo were way too far ahead of their time; home video was nowhere near reaching the mass market revolution that is going on right now. In those days, printing out really, really nice documents was something people could get their heads around, especially in the ugly reality of dot matrix printers and fanfold paper. These days, thanks mostly to good timing and savvy purchases, Apple all but owns the video and graphics niche as well.
Commodore failed simply because of horrible management, just like Atari. Hell, the Amiga never even should have been a Commodore product, it was designed by Jay Miner, the Atari engineer behind the Atari VCS and the Atari 400/800. Atari was offered the Amiga and payed for some of its development, and for some reason decided not to see it to completion. No doubt the same kind of idiocy that lead Atari to pass on the rights to the Nintendo Entertainment System. When Commodore slipped in and sneakily purchased the Amiga out from under them, a livid Jack Tramiel, president of Atari, (who founded Commodore and introduced the PET/VIC/C64 series and eventually got all pissy and left Commodore to purchase a money hemorrhaging Atari) sued Commodore and scrambled to slap together the Atari ST as a competitor, practically out of spite. Engineered in something like 6 months, while the Amiga languished in legal limbo, the Atari ST (dubbed by some, "the Jackinstosh") actually wasn't too bad (if quirky) and featured a single-tasking OS from Digital Research, the guys who passed on the IBM PC operating system allowing Microsoft to step in to save the day. While slightly faster than, and sharing the same CPU as the Amiga and the Mac, the Atari ST was nothing compared to the much more complex and amazing multi-tasking Amiga. The ST would eventually sport an inexpensive laser printer (two years after Apple) and the ability to run Mac and PC software better than the real thing. Atari tried to compete in desktop publishing, and some big name publishing software got their start on Atari, but Atari couldn't shed its gaming stigma and refused to spend the marketing dollars to correct that. Commodore didn't fare much better in the image department and didn't even bother to make a laser printer or try to compete with Mac at all it seems, although the Amiga outsold the Atari by a substantial margin. Maybe that's all they cared about. They later tried to get into the game console business with a dumbed down Amiga with a CD-ROM, but it was too late for Commodore and the faded away in all but the video realm. Atari eventually did find their niche in music thanks to built in MIDI and sequencer software like Cubase, and it is still used by a few musicians, although nothing like it was in its heyday.
Apple made it out almost by default because Atari and Commodore were so inept
+0 Meh
Could have sworn TOS/GEM was largely written in PL/M, though obviously there was plenty of support for C programming. That said, the criticisms of the OS have to do with its sparse set of features (it was ultimately an updated version of CP/M, with features added from MSDOS, and with the Mac-like GEM front-end added), rather than how well documented it was.
The Apple lawsuits had no effect on Atari's GEM, which was effectively a fork Atari was responsible for. Digital Research had to cripple the PC version. Both PC and ST versions had "overlapping windows", the fixes were more that the GEM2 file management Desktop (ie Finder replacement) had fixed windows for viewing files (but this only affected that one "application"), ordinary applications were allowed to overlap whatever windows they wanted.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.