[Elecraft] ELEPRODUCT POLL - Apple (OT)

[Mike Morrow]

>>Then a company (Franklin?) came up with a work-around.
>
>Phoenix Technologies, actually.

I seem to recall that Franklin's fame was a close clone of the Apple II.  I
still haven't figured out how they were able to thwart the resulting assault
by Apple's infamous legal pit-bulls.

I never cared for the baseless arrogance of the Apple corporate gang.
Apple machines since the first Mac have been user programable only in the
sense that an electric typewriter is user prograbable.  In other words,
Apple wants the lowly unwashed customer to be able to do easily *only* what
Apple thinks the customer should be able to do.  The thought of including
with every operating system simple, useful, and powerful features such as a
Basic interpreter or an equivalent to debug.com caused the Apple gang
apoplexy.  IBM's inclusion of these features in MS-DOS showed a much greater
confidence in the capability, intelligence, and creativity of its customer
base, while Apple appealed to what we hams would call appliance operators.
It's a shame, too, because had Apple not adopted their offensive philosophy,
there was much to admire in the hardware and operating system concepts of
the Macs, and quite a lot to dislike about the IBM system.

It's fun to pull out my 29-year old copies of "Byte" magazine to recall the
good ol' early days.  How about spending $480 1975 dollars for a 16K RAM
memory board **kit**?

73,
Mike / KK5F