Apple ][ design (was: Bad feelings)

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sun Jun 22 21:21:38 1997

I never thought much of the apple design save for it was there and
successful by the only standard that counts...they sold like hotcakes.
It's not a technical judgement as that really didn't count! there were some
machines I considered poor, TRS-80-M1, at a time when z80 was minimally 2mhz
and many pushing 2.5 it plodded at 1.7, but it was a complete machine for
much less than many of it's kind and available through a nationally known
store.

Price vs performance _and_ popularity drove a market not real technology.
If it was useable and met the current market expectations it sold well.


If there was one significant impact apple made it was in the idea of low
cost software. Apples were not the home of $350 basic interpreters or
$500 compilers. But at one time I counted not less that 5 distictly
different OSs. Some were pretty poor but the drive to improve the beast
was there.

Allison
Received on Sun Jun 22 1997 - 21:21:38 BST