[Elecraft] ELEPRODUCT POLL - Apple (OT)

[Bill Coleman]

On May 15, 2004, at 11:07 AM, Mike Morrow wrote:

> 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.

In the end, they couldn't. Eventually, Apple shut them down.

> 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.

Actually, that's not true. Apple fully intended to put out a 
programming language. The original Macintosh only shipped with MacWrite 
and MacPaint, and there was some delay before other software was 
available. One of the products that Apple worked feverishly on was 
MacBASIC. It was about ready to ship in the summer of 1985, but then 
Microsoft insisted that Apple kill it. Microsoft came out with their 
own copy of BASIC for the Mac, but it didn't have any of the special 
features in MacBASIC to take advantage of the unique Macintosh 
attributes.

Apple eventually did ship a programming language with every Macintosh 
-- in 1988 they included Hypercard with every Mac. It was pretty 
powerful what you could do with it, but unfortunately it was one of 
those innovative products that defied classification.

Currently, Apple ships *FULL* software development tools with MacOS X, 
and has since it shipped in 2001.

>   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.

The true appliance product was the Apple Lisa. Apple kept that entire 
software market to themselves. Third parties need not apply. With the 
Mac, Apple encouraged third parties right from the start to develop 
unique software products.

BASIC was pretty much a staple of those early machines. I don't believe 
the current copies of Windows ship with BASIC, either.

> 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.

Apple has certainly changed their "offensive philosophy" since they 
ship full development tools!

> 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**?

One of the reasons I bought a SWTPc 6800 system in 1977, a 4K RAM card 
kit was only $100, versus $250 for an 8K RAM card kit for the S-100 
bus.

Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr at arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
             -- Wilbur Wright, 1901