Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!romkey@mit-borax From: romkey@mit-borax@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: Why people own Apples Message-ID: <4967@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Thu, 8-Sep-83 16:39:25 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.4967 Posted: Thu Sep 8 16:39:25 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 15-Sep-83 07:10:56 EDT Lines: 79 From: John L. Romkey Ok, in my opinion, decvax!tektronix!tekid!tekig1!gregr@ucb-vax asked for it with the flame about why apple's are better than ibm PCs. ******** FLAME ON ******** 1) keyboard uP and flexibility. Apple's can produce all possible ASCII characters, allowing each key to be redefined. That's great; it's too bad that the normal keyboard doesn't have all the ascii characters on it. My PC's keyboard is soft; I can do anything I want with it, including making it Dvorak (which isn't really something I want to do). It's easy to write and install a new keyboard driver which cooperates with the operating system on my PC. And my PC's keyboard comes with the PC. 2) My PC has an excellent 80 column display. The monochrome display doesn't bother my eyes, and I prefer it over other displays that I've used around the lab. I haven't used an 80 column display on an apple, so I can't compare them, but I don't see anything wrong with the PC's display. Does the apple 80 column display do inverse video, highlighting, blinking and underlining? And how much do you have to pay for a monitor to use the inexpensive 48x128 or 132 or 160 character display? 3) Memory arguments seem pretty silly. My PC used to have 192K of RAM in it. Lots of people by disk emulators for their PC's. I know one person whose PC has at least 2M of RAM in it. Can your processor directly address 1M of RAM? The 8088 can. And speaking of processors, 4) Oh, so the apple has the wonderful, famous, powerful 6502. Blah. I don't think that people should boast about those kinds of things. I would find it mildly embarassing. There are places for 6502s and 6800s and 8080s (and yes, sadly, even the Z80 now), and running as the main processor in my PC is not one of them. I would dispute the claim that the 6502 has the largest selection of software available for it. Does all of it run on the apple? How much runs on Commodore machines? Seriously, you can build an 8088 based machine pretty cheaply now and comparing the 8088 to any 8 bit processor, I think the winner is the 8088. That doesn't mean I like the 8088; I don't. I think it's a tremendous crock (but I don't want to start up THAT argument again) and that the 68000 and especially the 16032 are far superior. But the memory arguments about the apple vs. the PC are bogus: first, the PC can have as much or more memory than the apple, and second, the PC can access the memory in a more natural way. I would almost always opt for a large, directly accessed address space over bank switching. Was there a hint that the apple is as good or better than an S100 system? All the expandability? Maybe some S100 user would like to take offense; I certainly would if I had an S100 system. And new hardware for the PC? Take a look at Byte or PC magazine. Yes, I believe that any board you can buy for your apple, I can find for my PC. Lots of disk drives and hard disks, too. And even an ethernet interface. I also believe (but cannot substantiate this belief, perhaps someone who's used CP/M 3.0 and MSDOS 2.0 can help me) that anything CP/M 3.0 can do, MSDOS 2.0 can do (better?). MSDOS 2.0 has i/o redirection and path searches and installable device drivers and lots of stuff (no, I really like Unix better and think that MSDOS 2.0 is broken in a variety of uninteresting ways, but that's a different flame). It bothers me when people, faced with new hardware (new ideas?), clutch at their old machines and shout that they're better, when even a superficial analysis shows the newer machine to be better. I understand that they might not want to throw out their old machine and go buy a new one; few people can really afford that. And I understand why people won't want to say "well, your machine is better then mine but I can't afford one like yours...". But getting up on a soapbox and shouting out that something that seems ill researched and largely prejudiced (though I've done it before, and might be doing it now) seems silly and leads to long flaming sessions. Especially when taunts are thrown in for extra heat. So, I'll leave with a taunt of my own. I typed this message on an IBM PC. I was telnetting to a vax, Mit-Borax, when I typed it. I netted into the vax over a 10Mb ethernet, and my PC was running TCP/IP and was connected to the ethernet by a 3COM ethernet interface. Can your apple do that? John Romkey romkey@mit-borax