<The principal complaint I heard about the M1 was the principal complaint
<about the M3. It was a paper tiger until you opened the box and added a
<bunch of stuff/mods. The same, to lesser extent, perhaps, could be said fo
<the Apple. The Apple was made easy-to-open. The RS boxes were not.
RS didn't want people opening the box. Since there really wasn't a bus on
it internally to hook up to there was little reason besides the internal
hacks (lowercase, speed ups, control ^key, and tape fixes.). The real
problem is the V1 EI was a total dissaster. Obviously the designer new
nothing about the timing and skew constraints for Dram. the later V2 EI
was far better.
The other thing was apple sorta supported adding boards to increase
functionality or performance. They were amoung the first to have the
essence of plug and play. That was a very good thing.
<When I saw my first PC in a commercial environment, it was running CP/M-86
<because that had the software the business owner was using previously on hi
<Z-80. I often wondered what motivated him to switch. I also saw a couple
<of people's Apple-II running CP/M-86, and was awed by the fact they'd run a
<OS that was slower than the previous and better-endowed (with software)
<CP/M-80 in the same basic environment.
it wasn't an operating system thing it was programs like databases (DBASE)
and spreadsheets (multiplan and VISICALC) what were the killer apps for
business and they ate RAM big time. The z80 could have banked ram, some
did but there never got to be a concenses on how to do it and support it at
the OS level and then the 16bit cpus wer hyped to solve that "64k barrier".
<IBM really performed only one major service to the microcomputer world:
<They lent it its own trade name, which was its legitimacy. Having done
<that, the behemoth was overrun by smaller, more adept innovators.
Absolutly. The Compupro and other 8086 S100 systems were far faster and
could run many more OSs and apps. One outfit held off from PCs until
1993 when it was a leap to 386s. The leap also was from older DBASE to
the then hotter Paradox. Sometimes software drives hardware.
Allison
Received on Sun Apr 11 1999 - 13:37:48 BST