Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: all and sundry
Message-ID: <12796@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 7 May 90 17:39:25 GMT
References: <9005050727.AA21521@apple.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory
Lines: 36

In article <9005050727.AA21521@apple.com> VS83F8@UMKCVAX3.BITNET writes:
>*SIGH* AU/X and X-Windows. Big, beautiful, *FAST* x-windows.
>or how about nice color Mathmatica. Or realistic speeds in
>2-d cad programs. And some damn fine spreadsheets in wingz.
>But point taken. Most people *DO* just do word processing,
>or maybe a flatfile db, or simple spreadsheet and they really
>don't need that kind of power.

Mathematica COULD run just fine on the IIGS, it simply hasn't been
ported there, probably because Wolfram doesn't see a sufficient
market to justify the investment.  The same is true of most decent
Mac applications.  It isn't a matter of "power" but of marketing.

>parts of it *are* that old. but as numerous people have pointed
>out the OS is actually *newer* than the mac. for ancient look at
>the pc world, with screeming i486's running **DOS** Ha!

Reasonable 486s run UNIX, which is older still, if you want to be
pedantic.  However, age has nothing necessarily to do with utility.

>Considering that scsi is a simple chipset, the biggest obstical to
>a built in scsi on the II line is addressing the scsi space. and
>with a 16bit machine that *should* not be a problem.

What in the world do you mean, "scsi space"?  Even 8-bit Apples can
access SCSI devices just fine, thank you.  It's the operating system's
interpretation of the filesystem format that limits some Apples, not
the SCSI system as such.

>do you think the gs would benifit from a built in compatibility with pcs?

Only to the extent that it would remove one incentive to buy a PC clone.
(The incentive being that there is a lot of software for the IBM PC
family that is not available for the Apple II family.)  However, by the
time you added the extra disk drives, monitors, etc. you might as well
have simply bought a PC clone and left the Apple IIGS alone.