archangelrichard said:
this is for lettherightlensin
"I hate Apple worship when it comes to tech since their Apple II's were very soon outdated junk" - this hasn't happened yet; and for reasons of what the Apple II is - completely modifiable. Don't like the keyboard? Get any ascii encoded keyboard and build a cable end (I did and had 25 feet of cable to boot) Don't like the video? You can add a video board and run at higher resolutions (e.g. I had a Spies Labs "double Hi-Res" board with 80 columns of text and 64 colors (well, OK; 8 were black and variations of black). Want Sound? Choose from a number of sound cards from aftermarket manufacturers like the Solid State Music board with 16 voices and synthesizer in and out ports (in fact the standard speaker could be connected to an external speaker - I did with a 12" shelf speaker and the tone drops a bit like a boy going through puberty). Add-on tenkey keyboards, add on 8088 processor board with the Original Seattle Computer DOS (bought by Microsoft and changed into PC DOS / MS DOS) AND add in an 8080 board and run CP/M (OK so I ran BOTH - at the same time!); etc. Disk drives? you can get dual double side double density, Hard drives, 8" floppies, you name it. Memory? There is available on the aftermarket a 786K board (more than you could put on a PC)
yeah and how many programs actually took advantage of all that stuff?
exactly
It had a slow 1MHz 6502 chip which had to drive not just regular calculations but audio and video as well. No custom graphics or audio bus. No nothing. Most bare bones boring design you could imagine. It's not like the other makes couldn't take expansions either, you could plug stuff into them as well although not many expansion cards were made for the others.
the Apple II didn't usher in any modern hardware design, not a custom chip or advanced bus in the thing
I give it credit for starting the whole home computer thing, it gets a lot for that. But boom it was quickly blow away by the Atari 800 which foreshadowed the modern home computer by using custom chips for various tasks as a standard.
there is no way to obsolete a generic computer like this but what made it end up obsolete was the added convenience of other computers that came out later based on what Apple did: for example, the reason the first PC had openly documented slots was to compete with Apple, used Shurgart Assoc. standard floppy interface was to compete with Apple, had openly accessible video standards was to compete with Apple -- and the bad news? Apple's 1.85 Mhz processor had a 1 Mhz throughput but IBM's 4.77 Mhz 8088 "16 bit" (not really but) had to PAGE the processor to read commands OR inputs (unlike the true 16 bit 8086 which needed 32 bit memory) AND had to page memory to get above 64K because of this; had a throughput of 1 Mhz! (the cp/m based 8080 processor computer got up to 8 Mhz throughput but had no graphics capabilities nor as easy to interface as the Apple II's 6502)
Yes, the original IBM PC was every bit as much of a wreck as the Apple II. IBM didn't even believe in the home market and put a trash team on it since they didn't want to devote any good resources to it.
At the same time people were spending thousands and thousands for creaky IBM clones running MS-DOS or still Apple IIs believe it or not or the original MACs some people were getting stuff like Amiga 1000s with 8Mhz fully 16bit 68000 CPU (ok MAC had that part), custom audio/graphics bus, advanced custom chipsets to drive audio, graphics (with display processors that could sync graphics code to be run to exact location of current place the beam was scanning a CRT),DMA to discs/ports and a fully pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with a GUI that had some modern innards that Linux only wishes it had.
And remember the mess people had to go through each time they installed even a basic soundblaster or something in a clone or an Apple? Well it was autoconfig plug and play baby with the Amiga from day one. Plug it in and flick the on switch and it works perfectly, automatically.
All included, all standard and supported by all programs and all for only a fraction of the price of the PC clones or the MAC and shockingly for not even much more than a bare bones Apple II, come on.
How long did it take for Windows or MAC to get pre-emptive multi-tasking? First they didn't even do any sort of multi-tasking and then they did non-premeptive fixed slices and other messes. It took them a while. Years. Amiga had it back in 1985! While clones were clunking along with MS DOS junk and then early rudiments of Windows which couldn't even handle "windows" properly at first. Windows on amiga were 100% full as on the MAC and they could also run at different resolutions on different vertical segments of the monitor, by using the copper chip to reprogram the display output on each scanline.
Plus the code was a heck of a lot more efficient taking only 1/4 and 1/16th the amount of code needed to be run through to accomplish each task switch (once the other two finally even got around to offering task switching).
And look at a modern PC, with it's custom PCIe buses, DMA, custom chips offloading everything. The hardware looks a heck of a lot more like an old Amiga than an old Apple or Clone.
It sure is a shame that it wasn't OS like Amiga or BeOS or something that everyone was using now (obviously in more modern form).
This is a horrible oversimplification - which matches the extremely horrible one that you used; completely ignorant lies like "when there were advanced computers running at 16x the speed" - NO there were not, the TI 99 was a real 32 bits and the most advanced but their Midsize computer division insisted it be so handicapped that they never made a dent in the PC market and NOBODY ran at 16X the speed. "with 4096 colors at once" - I don't know what you are talking about; Atari couldn't do this (but they could "strobe" the color register so it would appear to go through it's 16 colors and rotate through others; the PC's CGA did 16 where Appkle did 8, EGA only got to 256 colors and that was years later; "stereo wave sampled sound built" - actually built in is an issue with new rechnology as it locks you into something that could easily get obsoleted but you could easily add this to an Apple II; "pre-emptive multi-tasking," - you could do this with add in processor boards as I said I did above
Really so now the Apple II OS was pre-emptive multi-tasking? Not even the MAC did that until years after release.
The Amiga did 4096 colors at once in 1985. Granted that is too late to be fair to compare to the Apple II, except.... Apple fanboys used to routinely tell people to not get Atari or CBM toys and to at least get an Apple II instead! Yes I even had dealers tell me that the Apple II was a far better buy than any Amiga! Some told me that because the Amiga used custom chips to offload audio and graphics and could do sprites and multi-hardware overlayed bitmaps and show 4096 colors at once that meant it was a toy since no serious, professional computer of any use for anything real would ever have 4096 colors or sprites or custom graphics chips (and the same jokers I see today bragging about their latest nvidia cards and how serious their machines are, LOL). So it is fair to compare the Amiga to the Apple II since the other side made it fair by trying to promote it over the Amiga back then as utterly laughable as that was.
And yeah the Amiga did have 16x, actually more than that, times the computing power of an Apple II (and sure plug in some new APple card that a few obscure pieces of software use, well heck then plug one into an AMiga, etc.). And 4096 colors at once, etc.
"The MAC was basically junk within a year compared to competition" -- and again you just have no idea and spout the same fanboy ignorance; what competition? Who made computers that did what the first Mac did?
wow.
you must be kidding.
Atari ST??
Amiga 1000??
Windows 3 was almost ten years away, nobody else was using graphics fonts - a very basic technology to what we do today; the Mac used SCSI (a Parallel interface rather than cheaper one-bit-at-a-time serial li8ke IBM used); if you don't understand the technology you don't know what you are talking about
hate to say it but there were other things other than clones and some of them did use graphics fonts and SCSI and they even had direct DMA for floppies and stored more on a floppy and had faster throughput than the MAC
they had GUI like the MAC only they also had much more serious and robust command line interfaces as well compelte with UNIX-like pipes and so on and one of them even had multi-tasking back then
There are no facts to what you posted, no proof, no sense. All you did, in the worst fashion imaginable, was lash out ignorantly for no apparent reason - thus is the illogic of the fanboy
Funny then how your precious Apple (and IBM and MS) hid Amigas under the desks to run their own booths at some computer trade shows since their own computers couldn't cut it half as well. If the actually companies decided to hide other brands under the table rather then show off using their own on the table top then maybe that says something. And maybe you are the fanboy.