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mdj wrote:
> On Feb 1, 12:28 pm, "Michael J. Mahon"  wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> It's a great example of excessive minimisation; they clearly failed to
> recognise that peripheral cards were a user-installed part, not
> engineer installed!
> 
>> 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.  ;-)
> 
> Indeed. It's also interesting that the industry (particularly in
> software) still hasn't learned many of these lessons :-)

Too true.  But then we shouldn't expect elegance in software as long as
cycles and RAM are "free" and programmers are paid by the line of code.
;-)

-michael

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