Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>I suspect that James is a bit too young to have observed the PC market
>develop in its early days so let me correct the record a bit. In the
>early days the IBM PC was hardly a joke. It was actually considered
>rather revolutionary when it was released in 1981. The PC ran at a
>shade under 5 MHz and its Intel 8088 processor could address up to 1 MB
>of physical memory. Its competition at the time was not the Apple Mac
>but rather the Apple II, TRS-80 and other similar machines with slower
>processors and all only capable of addressing 64 KB of memory. The
>machine blew away the competition aided by a higly effective advertising
>campaign... featuring Charlie Chaplin.
>
>
Took the words right out of my mouth. I had an Apple II+ at home when I
got an XT at work. Just no comparison. For business use, the XT with
Lotus made the II+ with visicalc look like a toy. And it had a nice
stable 80 column video, where it was 40 columns or a flakey video
adapter for the II+
>I agree that the IBM PC-XT might be a joke compared to the Apple Mac
>with it's GUI interface and Motorola 68000 processor.
>
I'm not sure I even agree with that. When they first offered free one
day trials of the Mac, I tried one, and was more than happy to take it
back and use the XT at work and the XT clone I had built at home. The
first Macs had a nice interface in many ways, but they couldn't actually
DO much. Of course software came along to remedy that and they started
adding enough memory, etc. Of course, I was interested in word
processing, spreadsheets and database work at the time, not graphic arts.
Since all serious database work at that time was still mainframe, the
IBM PC3270, which was an integrated PC and 3270 terminal with hot key
switching and integrated data transfer, was just the finest thing around
for years.
>However, the Mac
>was far from Apple's first offering. The XT was introduced in 1982 when
>Apple's only competition was still based on the original 6502 processor
>designs from the late '70's.
>
You want memory management as a joke, look at the 6502 machines. I got
my II+ cheap from a small business that couldn't get their apps to work
reliably. Turned out it had a bad memory chip. When it booted, it ran up
through memory doing read/write tests until one failed, then set the
amount of memory installed/available to the nearest lower boundary.
Cool, if it told you so, but it didn't. It just completed booting.
Unless you poked around, you didn't even know how much memory the OS
thought it had available. So these guys had a 64k machine that was
operating as a 48k machine and they never knew it. With the OC and XT,
you set little switches to tell it how much memory was installed. In
boot-up, it tested the memory and told you if there was a problem.
>The Mac wasn't introduced until 1984 and that only after the first attempt in
>1983 (the Lisa) proved to be a failure.
>
>
Because it was a terrible kludge.
> From that point on the Mac's pretty much got it right but only on the
>user interface.
>
I still never 'got' that business where you had to hold down the mouse
button while you pulled it down a menu. Even with the earliest, deeply
flawed Windoze, you could click once on words on the top and then roll
down through the menu without having to hold down the button to keep the
menu from either disappearing or executing the choice it was on when you
let the button go. Hated that.
><snip
>Chuck Norcutt
>who was implementing virtual memory management and multi-tasking into
>OS/2 for the IBM PS/2 series nearly 20 years ago. :-)
>
>
Too bad about OS/2, that was a real OS. With XP, MS seems to have
finally come up with something solid, though far from perfect, at least
stable. I'm leaving IE out of that comment.
Moose
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