Re: PBS show

[Doug Hughes <Doug.Hughes@Eng.Auburn.EDU>]

>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!
>

The //e made a lot of improvements in this area. uppper+lower case + mouse
text chars support. 80 column cards with double hires graphics. Also,
the floppies weren't that slow compared to the terrible cassette drives in
common use around that time, so some perspective is in order. Clone
situation didn't help them, but then, it didn't help IBM a whole lot either,
though it did wonders for MicroSoft. ;)

Many many many companies developed cards which plugged into the expansion
slots. Problem was, there were too few slots (especially since you
couldn't use slot 3 if you had an 80 column card). :)
(Printer card, modem card, hard disk card, 80 column card, mockingboard/sound
card, graphics tablet/koala pad card, z80 card, RGB graphics card, etc etc..

BTW, what does this have to do with cypherpunks? can we cancel the topic
now?

--
____________________________________________________________________________
Doug Hughes					Engineering Network Services
System/Net Admin  				Auburn University
			doug@eng.auburn.edu
		Pro is to Con as progress is to congress