On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Bill Yakowenko wrote:
> A 1979 Pinto is classic, but a 1980 Pinto won't be until next year.
> (Pardon my ignorance here; I have almost no idea when Pintos were
> actually made.)
>
> By that logic, your Apple 2 may or may not be classic, based on
> its exact date of manufacture. Is this the position you want to
> take?
With cars, each year's model had some distinguishing feature from the
model before and after. So that's why people rave about a '56 Chevy, and
not a '55 or a '58.
With computers, there wasn't much difference between the first year's run
and the last year's run.
Taking an Apple //e for example, there were about four major variations
during its lifetime (of about 10 years in production). But nobody really
distinguishes between the first three. The only thing that changed from
the first one to the second was the color of the keycaps and some minor
motherboard revisions, and from the second to the third you had some ROM
changes, additional characters added to the character set, and a CPU
upgrade. It only really changed significantly (superficially mostly) when
the Platinum //e came out with the extended keyboard (with numeric
keypad).
The Coco 2 had many different design variations during its life cycle, but
people generally just say "I have a CoCo2", not "I have a June 1982 CoCo2
with the low-profile keyboard and the Rev B1 motherboard" [these are just
made up characteristics...I know nothing of the CoCo2 save for the visible
outward differences I see amongst the handful I have]. The point is many
computers had minor design changes over the years that computer nerds
don't tend to make a big deal about since the computer basically worked
the same. Car collectors go to great pains to memorize all the
differences in models from year to year because those changes were
delineated by year boundaries that as a result are easy to categorize.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Wed Jan 27 1999 - 01:45:18 GMT