toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (02/20/90)
mjohnson@Apple.COM (Mark B. Johnson) writes: >of the roots of this company, and as long as there are developers developing >for the Apple II there will be some kind of support from this group. Don't you guys start saying that. Gassee did, but as an Apple spokesman it isn't good enough and the hollow promise fooled no one. Developers as a whole look to Apple for signs that the machine is worth investing their time in. Only a few are specialized enough or popular enough to develop full blast for the Apple // simply because they hold a solid portion of the market (Applied Engineering for example). In short, Apple either makes the machine worth buying (and the developers then flock to the market), or it lets the machine slide slowly into oblivion. Guess which Apple's been doing for the last few years. There's a ray of hope, though -- with all the experience gained by Apple since the //gs, it is very possible to produce a killer machine for an extremely low price -- if the following design criteria are paramount: 1. Design efficiently, to get more features for less cost. This rule is violated right and left by the //gs, primarily because of the Mega //. The Apple // is still the simplest system out there, and we should exploit that. 2. Design for the future, to take advantage of high performance features when they become affordable. This means support for true color, EPROM disks, caching, SCSI coprocessing, DMA everywhere, and faster busses. Many of these can be added now, as the real expense is in the memory chips, and NOT in the custom logic that drives them. Let's think ahead this time and do it right. 3. Design flexible features, which is easy in these days of custom gate arrays. We've come a long way from when Woz had to use a bizarre screen map as his refresh counter. It's about time we had a video system that inherently supported genlock, arbitrary-sized monitors, and overlay, with the optional electronics added via a dedicated connector. I have on disk in my room a half finished post describing a hypothetical computer, The Apple //f -- which is a real show stopper but needs some good cost reduction analysis applied to it. Considering what Apple's done in the past, they could probably do most of what I have in mind for real cheap -- but some serious R&D investment is required. And as I see it it's justified. If Apple decides to resurrect the Apple //, it has the unique opportunity to create a machine for the 90's around a very simple infrastructure. I hope they do. Todd Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu
cs225af@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (02/20/90)
>I have on disk in my room a half finished post describing a hypothetical >computer, The Apple //f -- which is a real show stopper but needs some good the Apple //finally! has a kinda nice ring to it. Now if only it got built....... -- rubio (rubio-1@uiuc.edu)