Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcnc!uvaarpa!haven!ncifcrf!nlm-mcs!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Apple says "Mac will emulate a II"
Keywords: emulation Apple2 Mac
Message-ID: <12754@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 2 May 90 05:15:31 GMT
References: <1990Apr25.130246.26514@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <1990Apr26.163725.8518@eng.umd.edu> <12290@wpi.wpi.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory
Lines: 39

In article <12290@wpi.wpi.edu> jayg@wpi.wpi.edu (Jay Giurleo) writes:
>Can you blame Apple for wanting to start moving from an archaic platform to
>something more current? ... By forcing Apple to make such an old machine,
>with sales going down, we might all be the cause of Apple's downfall as a
>company, which in my opinion, makes the best personal computers around.

There are some assumptions that should be challenged here.  The first is
that "age" is relevant.  The human race has been drinking water for
millions of years; isn't it about time we moved on to a more modern
liquid platform?  See how silly the argument sounds when applied to
other areas of endeavor?

The Apple IIGS is not a particularly "old" machine; it's newer than the
IBM PC that (along with its clones) dominates the personal computer market.
The only things "old" about it are:
	(1) Its Apple bus for peripheral cards;
	(2) Its CPU supports 6502 instructions.
Neither of these is fatally damaging to the future of the product line;
a future Apple II model could support just the ADB, SCSI, and serial ports
and be quite successful, while it could also support just the 16-bit mode
of the 65816 if there was any advantage to that.  It's clear that the IIGS
simply HAD to support these 8-bit Apple II features for compatibility
purposes, but I would consider continued support for these features to be
negotiable, depending on what the tradeoffs were.

In the long run, personal computers better not look much like the IIGS
OR the Macintosh.  NeXT is a step in the right direction, but it's not
where it needs to be yet.  I won't think personal computers have arrived
until the day that as a routine matter of course the typical citizen has
to check his computer for messages when he arrives home, has his bills
paid automatically with transaction records immediately available on
request, has his meals cooked on schedule, his social calendar maintained,
his home entertainment center (including reading material) controlled,
etc. etc. all through his home computer.  While a few hobbyists have
managed some of this for themselves, the rest of the world is not geared
up to interface with such systems.  (There are a few tentative steps
toward it, by IRS, Postal Service, AT&T Mail, some banks, and so on.)
Note that most of the things that need to occur to make this a reality
have little to do with the "age" of computer system architectures.