Re: PBS show

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 5:35 PM 6/13/96, jim bell wrote:
>At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
...
>>first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal
>>computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked
>>too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.)
>
>But the Apple II WAS a toy!  Non-detached keyboard, poor placement of reset
>key, upper-case only, 40-character wide display, odd microprocessor, VERY
>SMALL capacity floppies (which were very slow as well), as well as a hostile
>legal situation regarding the building of clones.  Hell, they even objected
>to other companies building boards which plugged into the bus!

Compared to my SOL, the Apple II would've been more useful, in retrospect.
As to the 40-character display, that was the norm in those days. (My SOL,
and certainly the other machines available to home users at that time, had
only a 40-character-wide display...when in worked.)

The comments about the floppies (" VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were
very slow as well") is even more off-base. In fact, it was probably Apple's
ability to put _any_ kind of floppies on the Apple II, for a reasonable
price, that ensured its success. Processor Technology was effectively sunk
by delays in getting its "Helios" 8-inch floppy drive working. The bigger
and faster 8-inchers may have been technically superior to Apple's
"Integrated Woz Machine" drivers and 5-inch floppies, but Apple was
shipping. That counts for a _lot_.

>BTW, Intel shares a substantial proportion of the blame for Apple's choice
>of the 6502.  The decision was made, I've heard, because Intel was still
>trying to get $200 for a slow 8080, while Western Design Center (?) wanted
>only about $20 for a 6502.

You need to check your claims more carefully. There are always many reasons
a chip is selected for a design.

>And by refusing to build Masatoshi (?) Shima's design for the Z-80, they
>totally lost the race for the 8-bit PC world.  The Z-80 turned into the
>highest-volume 8-bit microprocessor by far, leaving both the 8080 and the
>8085 in the dust, and even the 6502.

Again, your understanding of the history of Intel, Zilog, and the industry
in general is lacking.

The design and process technology resources were instead committed to the
8086, and history is rather clear about the wisdom of doing that. Intel is
now capitalized at something like $50-70 billion, and Zilog is no longer on
the radar screen.


--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."