mdj wrote:
> On Feb 1, 1:56 am, Michael Black  wrote:
> 
>> Or, decades later, people have forgotten or even never knew that there
>> were home computers before the "IBM PC".  Again, it's
because the previous
>> computers are dwarfed by the arrival of that computer, fused with many
>> people having arrived after that point.  It doesn't mean there weren't
>> small computers before IBM came along, just that few remember.
> 
> It really didn't help that Apple themselves tried very hard to forget
> that they made any computers before the Macintosh. It's a great
> historical irony that whilst Apple strived to build the ultimate
> computing 'appliance',  the industry was commoditised by a machine
> architecture that owes more than a little homage to the Apple II

Absolutely.

The IBM engineers that designed the PC looked long and hard at
the Apple II and its runaway success and copied freely when they
recognized a good thing.  The peripheral bus is a prominent example
of both getting it right (the bus itself) and wrong (no motherboard
slot decoding, no plug'n'play ROM convention).

Of course, the march of technology has rendered those deficits a
non-issue, but in the early 1980s, the extra chips per card and
software configuration problems were a real cost.

And it is very interesting that the Apple II was the result of
Woz wanting to get the most fun potential and future-proofing as
possible for the smallest number of chips.  ;-)

-michael

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