Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!daredevil!vita From: vita@daredevil.steinmetz (Mark F. Vita) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: New Macs Message-ID: <13027@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 26 Jan 89 17:49:22 GMT References: <1378@trotter.usma.edu> <8400065@m.cs.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com Reply-To: desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP (Mark F. Vita) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 36 In article <8400065@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >I think Apple has shot itself in the foot. ... >Apple has made the same mistake as IBM! And the blunder comes right >after they watched IBM falter! People resist PS/2's & the >microchannel bus partly because they must throw away their AT/XT >cards. Now people can resist the SE/030 for the same reason! I don't think the two situations are really comparable. There aren't nearly as many SE cards around as there are PC cards. This is true probably for two reasons: 1) the SE just hasn't been around as long as the PC/AT/etc. 2) the SE is usable as shipped; you don't need to jam 2 or 3 cards in the thing just to make it operational, the way you do with a PC. If you think about it, there are really relatively few cards offered for that SE slot. And a lot of those are accelerator cards and so forth which aren't going to be useful in an SE/30 anyway. I'd guess that out of the entire installed base of Mac SEs, 80-90% have nothing in the slot. In the PC world, ~100% of the machines have one or more cards installed. Hence bus incompatibility is a MUCH larger problem for IBM than it is for Apple. Besides, as I understand it, Apple didn't really have much choice in the matter. Because of the differences in CPU architecture, forcing the SE/30 slot to be SE-compatible would have needlessly crippled the machine. Going with an incompatible slot was done for technical reasons, not for marketing reasons, as I suspect was the case with IBM's MCA. ---- Mark Vita ARPA: vita@ge-crd.ARPA General Electric Company UUCP: vita@desdemona.crd.ge.com Corporate R & D desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP Schenectady, NY uunet!steinmetz!desdemona!vita