Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!jm7e+ From: jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeremy G. Mereness) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Apple's greatest product Message-ID: Date: 10 Nov 88 21:40:46 GMT References: <7538@dasys1.UUCP> Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 25 In-Reply-To: <7538@dasys1.UUCP> >Apple's greatest product is all the people captured by it's vision...all >the people who get together, whether in users groups or electronically to >help each other, to gripe and complain, or just "shoot the breeze" >No matter what computer the future holds for me, I think I'll be glad that >in 1984 I got this dinky Apple IIc...it's certainly not been an incredibly >boring machine! Nope, its not a boring machine. There is a lot of room to do a lot of fun stuff with Apple //s. With the Apple //, Apple forged the entire microcomputer industry, because the machine was open and programmable and personable. People were encouraged not simply to use prepackaged software, but to explore their own ideas and try to realize greater potential through the machines. Let's hope that vision doesn't die out because of marketing theories and relaxations of values and commitments. The programmable and accessible nature of the Apple // is an investment in the future. 90% of the people I talk to in the CMU CS department tell me they got their start with the Apple //, and that they feel it remains a valuable and necessary product to perpetuate interest in computer science. They say no other machine could have sparked that interest, including Macs, because it takes 15 minutes and 100's of dollars of software just to plot a single line on the Mac graphics screen. Capt. Albatross jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu