This article fawns over a guy who quite mistakenly thought his terrible automation software was better than Windows, who then went on to "invent" callback URLs.
The technology behind it was (and still is) amazing. I'm not aware of anything in any other major operating system that even comes close.
> who then went on to "invent" callback URLs
No, that was Greg Pierce. Soghoian was still at Apple at that point.
ARexx on AmigaOS was pretty similar and shipped first (1990).
Apple users seem to overstate the importance of early pre-OSX Apple. For example, The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out)
We're not talking about some obscure research system here, that only very few people used. It was mainstream.
There's no doubt that the Commodore 64 had better graphics and sound hardware, but the idea that it's more powerful in general seems dubious at best. By the time 1983-84 rolled around, an Apple ][ machine was available with 80 column text, 128KB of memory, and a disk that transferred data 30 times faster than the 1541. Sprites and 3-voice audio are nice and all, but it doesn't make the C64 the machine I'd have chosen (even then) for anything other than games.
The 1541 disk is notably amazing because that blazing performance was the result of making the disk drive an entirely separate computer in its own right. This did at least make it possible to upload new firmware to the drive to improve the performance... but that was hardly standard. The only material advantages to the 1541 disk architecture was that it let the main machine be slightly cheaper, and it also enabled single disk drives to be multiplexed across multiple C64's.
From an educational point of view, it's also interesting to compare the difference in graphics programming models.
Drawing a line on the screen in Applesoft:
10 HGR
20 HPLOT 100, 120 to 150, 200
1. Switch the machine to graphics modes by POKEing data into graphics hardware control registers
2. Implement something like Bresenham's algorithm to get the pixels on the screen.
One of these is something that an interested layperson (teacher) can communicate to a class of elementary school students. The other is something out of an upper division undergraduate computer science curriculum.
(Admittedly, Terrapin's wonderful C64 Logo made things a lot better for the Commodore.)
> and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out)
It's important to consider the machines in their historical contexts. The Commodore 64 and Amiga were great machines at single points in time, but neither of them were created by an organization with the capability to effectively continue and promote their development. (ie: How much of the C64's success was due to setting its price so low that it couldn't fund ongoing development of the platform? Or due to short-term gains produced by a management strategy that alienated key allies in the long term?)
Viewed in that context today, Apple is now the most valuable company in the world and successful to the extent that I can look across the aisle of this train and see somebody watching a movie on an Apple product.
Commodore, in contrast, is happy memories, a bankrupt company that hasn't existed for decades, and a condemned Superfund environmental contamination site in a Philadelphia suburb.
While I have great personal fondness for the C64 machines, there are reasons the industry turned out the way that it did, reasons for Commodore's failure, and reasons for Apple's success... including the Apple ][.
Ask yourself why 4 decades later, there is still a huge demo scene around the C64 and Amiga, but not the Apple II?
The C64 could do things on stock hardware that would have blown your mind in the early 80s as having come from the future: look at the 11 minute mark at the Onslaught Demo https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA find me an Apple II demo on stock original hardware that comes even close. (Full screen video and digital audio streaming from floppy at 15fps) my school had Apple IIs, they did not inspire me to learn to program, my C64 did, and I learned 6502 Assembly, not basic, because the graphics I saw in demos and games were jaw dropping and inspiring unlike anything a kid saw on an Apple II.
And less 1 year after the Mac128, Commodore launches what was the iPhone of 1985, vertically integrated custom chips and software, for half the price that did all this: https://youtu.be/q7rKj0DU8Xs
The Mac128 was priced way outside a home users budget, had an almost unusable Tiny amount of memory, non expandable, terrible graphics and sound. It was not a home brew system, or for kids, Or for engineers.
For those reasons Commodore computers were way more popular with hackers and with kids, excellent games, and when you chose to explore, excellent hardware to learn to code on.
Apple’s success was mostly due to marketing, and don’t forget, Apple failed and almost went bankrupt too.
BTW, the total number of Apple IIs sold were less than six million, including 1.25 million IIgs as opposed to Five million Amigas and 12 million C64s. In Europe especially, the C64 dominated.
What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to?
> The Mac128 was priced way outside a home users budget, had an almost unusable Tiny amount of memory
Probably better to consider a comparison with the Apple model I was alluding to in my earlier post. The Apple //c was much cheaper than a Mac, had 80 column text, 128K RAM, and could run Appleworks. It didn't do games nearly as well as a C64, but you'd have been hard pressed to find as good a machine from Commodore for small office tasks. (Maybe the C128... it was cheaper and had a numeric keypad, but I don't think the software was as strong there as it was for Apple.)
> Apple failed and almost went bankrupt too.
That 'almost' is rather important, don't you think?
Yes, the C64 VIC and SID were just flexible enough, to enable them to do a large number of graphical and sound effects which they were never intended to do, like arbitrary X/Y positioning of the screen, line-crunching/stretching and sprite-crunching/stretching.
Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64: https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus...
Now, search for Apple II's demo scene, and it never materialized except on the IIgs for obvious reasons, and even there, it's paultry.
>Probably better to consider a comparison with the Apple model I was alluding to in my earlier post. The Apple //c was much cheaper than a Mac, had 80 column text, 128K RAM, and could run Appleworks. It didn't do games nearly as well as a C64, but you'd have been hard pressed to find as good a machine from Commodore for small office tasks. (Maybe the C128... it was cheaper and had a numeric keypad, but I don't think the software was as strong there as it was for Apple.)
Most offices used PCs. Home users didn't have much need for much office tasks, but those that did, had plenty of apps available for the C64. I used to write all of my school reports using GeoWrite on the C64, no problem. If you really needed 80 columns for the C64, there were hacks to get it, including software only ones, and plugin cartridges, and as you mentioned, the C128, which had 100% backwards compatibility with the C64, plus the hi-res VDC. It was notoriously hard to program for, but here's a slick demo for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8bEgX6n-QM Here's GeoWrite 128 in hi-res 80-column mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNosi2C9Ic
When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300. It sold 5.7 million machines (C128), more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500.
The Commodore computers sold for less than half the price, had much better graphical and sound capabilities (in the Amiga's case, it's severely understating the difference, the Mac didn't catch up for years and at a huge cost differential because Commodore, like the new post iPhone Apple, developed highly efficient, integrated, chipsets).
Apple got squeezed in the home market by Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair, and squeezed in the business market by IBM, their lifeline was finding a niche in education. The hagiography of fans rewrites Apple's history, because they were first and because of the reality distortion field, but really, their computers were pretty shitty. The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive.
Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use.
On the business side, up until 1984, Commodore made more money than Apple. Apple revenues took off with the introduction of the Mac, but this follows the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer. Up until Windows 95, when the trend was reversed.
I think at least part of our disagreement is a disagreement on personal priorities.
Just to illustrate:
> Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use.
Having used both machines, there's almost no chance I'd pick the Amiga, unless I wanted to play a game. The clearer display alone is a huge advantage. (In fact, I remember regretting the negative experience of a video producing high school friend of mine who I'd convinced to buy an Amiga 500. He had a much better experience a year or two later when he switched over to a PC.)
> Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64
Very impressive and a testament to the skill of the developers involved... but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years for their hardware's capabilities to be fully realized. Whatever my current machine will have been convinced to do in 35 years time is not likely to matter to me all that much, and certainly means nothing now.
So, while the flexibility of the hardware is nice and all, the hidden capabilities are only useful to the extent developers are forced by resource constraints to find them. The Atari 2600 had the same sort of thing... people were making it do amazing things into the 80's because they had to do so to gain access to a market, not because they found it a desirable property of the hardware to be forced into it.
(Note that recent demo coders that use these platforms as ways to challenge themselves are in a different category altogether.)
> Most offices used PCs.
Until the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 1983, it was very common for companies to buy Apple ][s for the express purpose of running VisiCalc. I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet.
> When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300.
You need to add a some things to those machines to be feature complete with a //c... at the very least a floppy disk drive. (And then you need to accept a disk with 3-4% the transfer rate of the Apple product.... I spent a bunch of time in my youth waiting for C64 software to load off disk.)
> more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500.
So that's the Amiga 1000, which would need a 256K memory expansion, an external monitor, and some work to connect it all up, to be comparable to the Mac. (Admittedly, the Amiga has color, but the Mac had 384 line display without interlacing and was more portable.)
> The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive.
The IIgs was introduced almost three years after the Mac 128K... why should it be surprising that it has some better capabilities than the earlier machine? (Probably more surprising is the fact that Apple kept the IIgs CPU as low as 2.8MHz.)
> the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer.
This is a weird argument to make, because it essentially implies Apple has good enough marketing to convince people over 40 years to make non-economic choices. It seems more likely to me that Apple has, over the years, better been than most at assembling a set of capabilities that people find valuable enough to pay for.
B&W 9" 512x384 vs Color Commodore 1080S 13" @ 640x256 or 640x512 interlaced and doubled as a great TV. Let's say you didn't want to use interlaced mode, the Amiga still was more productive because of its out of the box multi-screen functionality.
Flipping between screens on the Amiga was extremely fast, there was even a gesture for it (hold right click, then click) Multitasking is extremely important productivity.
I used to simultaneously do the following: Run a terminal program in the background for downloads or research, have my editor or productivity environment open in the foreground, and have auxillary utilities needed like graphic editors, music editors, running on background screens. It was years before MacOS even added cooperative multitasking (System7).
> but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years
Most of the innovative features did not require 35 years. Faster loaders, JiffyDOS, all existed in the 80s. Games already used sprite multiplexing, border knockouts, etc even as far back as the mid 80s. Digital audio was hipped in games like Great Giana Sisters, or Skate or Die. Have a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetgpWY7WOg The C64 market, like game consoles today, was one of steady progressive of capabilities. Each year, things got better on the same hardware, and so the value of the HW was extended. That isn't so for the Apple II, whose graphical and sound capability sucked at the beginning, and pretty much plateaued early.
For anyone who had bought a C64, they would have felt less need to upgrade year after year, because the software library continued to push the limits.
> I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet.
PET was a player until VisiCalc, but you're talking about a market size of a few hundred thousand machines. Most business was stilling being conducted on timeshare machines at this time.
https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/3/
>You need to add a some things to those machines to be feature complete with a //c... at the very least a floppy disk drive. (And then you need to accept a disk with 3-4% the transfer rate of the Apple product.... I spent a bunch of time in my youth waiting for C64 software to load off disk.)
If you had an Epyx Fastloader or Action Replay, loading a 200 block program (usual top end size) would take about 4-5 seconds. JiffyDOS could load a factor of 15 times faster, taking that down to about 1-2 seconds. (JiffyDOS replaced the ROM in the 1541)
> So that's the Amiga 1000, which would need a 256K memory expansion, an external monitor, and some work to connect it all up, to be comparable to the Mac. (Admittedly, the Amiga has color, but the Mac had 384 line display without interlacing and was more portable.)
Amiga 1000 worked without RAM expansion. It started with 256k (2x the Mac128). If you add the A1050 256k expansion, it adds $199. The 1080S monitor had stereo speakers, took both RGBI and Component Video, so I would use mine to for both my computer and to watch TV, which was much higher quality than regular TVs. The 1084 usually sold for $300. So for $1800, you got a system with 512k RAM, Color, Stereo Speaker Monitor, that also functioned as a high quality TV.
As an aside, I hooked my Amiga up to a regular composite monitor/TV before I got the official Commodore monitor.
>The IIgs was introduced almost three years after the Mac 128K... why should it be surprising that it has some better capabilities than the earlier machine? (Probably more surprising is the fact that Apple kept the IIgs CPU as low as 2.8MHz.)
Not surprising, the IIgs was Woz's baby, the Mac128k was Job's baby. They deliberately hobbled the IIgs because it would make the Mac look bad. If they ran it at full CPU speed, it would have been faster, cheaper, in addition to looking and sounding better.
> This is a weird argument to make, because it essentially implies Apple has good enough marketing to convince people over 40 years to make non-economic choices. It seems more likely to me that Apple has, over the years, better been than most at assembling a set of capabilities that people find valuable enough to pay for.
I think it's not really disputed that Apple has a cultish following, and that their marketing creates a reality distortion field. The Mac IIcx for example, was introduced in 1991 for $10,000 in 2018 inflation adjusted dollars ($5000 in 1991). You really think the IIcx was 3-4 times better than a PC in 1991 or an Amiga 3000/4000? For a narrow few, who could afford to drop $10,000 on a IIcx and $16,000 on a Laserwriter, the costs may have been justified.
But if you were doing say, video or sound work, an Amiga or Atari ST, or Silicon Graphics workstation were far better. Which is why, the Amiga's niche was DTV while the Mac's was DTP. But an Amiga with a Video Toaster was still a cheaper setup than a Mac with a LaserWriter, think about that. You could produce a show like Babylon-5 with Amigas, but with a setup costing 3 times as much, you could print some flyers.
I was typesetting documents with TeX in 1991 producing output far superior than what I saw coming out of professional Mac apps, and with far less intervention, for 10 times less cost.
It seems to me that the cost/benefit was not justified by Apple's markup on Macs, and you'd be better served by something 80% as good, but 1/2 the price.
Apple actually almost failed as a company three times, in 1993, 1997, and again in 2001, they had huge declines. The iPod and iPhone are what rescued the company, and in hindsight, the Apple II and Mac classic were basically also-rans. They mostly failed from a marketshare and software library perspective, that managed to extract a premium in niche markets, but so did many workstation vendors.
Having used both machines, as well as an interlaced 1024x768 SVGA, I assure you, I do not want to use interlaced mode.
> It was years before MacOS even added cooperative multitasking (System7).
Historical note: multitasking was introduced by MultiFinder in System 5. The ability to load and switch between multiple apps at the same time was available with an add on (Switcher) in early 1985. Where the Amiga was particularly strong was the fact it had preemptive multitasking and (IIRC) much more dynamic memory management than Apple's fixed memory blocks allocated at application start time. Even Windows didn't catch up with some of that until Windows 95 (which was somewhat hobbled by the 16-bit mutex.)
> The Mac IIcx for example, was introduced in 1991 for $10,000 in 2018 inflation adjusted dollars ($5000 in 1991). You really think the IIcx was 3-4 times better than a PC in 1991 or an Amiga 3000/4000?
The IIcx was really an early 1989 machine, which made it a contemporary of machines like this $7,500 Compaq Deskpro 386/20. (IBM PS/2's were similarly priced.)
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/10/business/the-executive-co...
> you're talking about a market size of a few hundred thousand machines.
That's a rather influential few hundred thousand.
> Most business was stilling being conducted on timeshare machines at this time.
(A lot still is, to the extent cloud instances are time shared. :-))
> a Laserwriter
Well the Laserwriter really opened up an entirely new product category. It was expensive, but, for a time, it was the only game in town at anything close to consumer level pricing. As much as you've correctly pointed out that education was one of Apple's strong points, the LaserWriter made DTP another strength.
As you point out, this is analogous to specific hardware making the Amiga particularly strong in Video production. (The Amiga chipset itself, as well as the Video Toaster.)
> with a setup costing 3 times as much, you could print some flyers.
Flyers may sound trivial now, but back then it was a big deal and a huge source of demand, and even now, the need for document preparation far outstrips the need for video production.
> I was typesetting documents with TeX in 1991 producing output far superior than what I saw coming out of professional Mac apps, and with far less intervention,
Anybody that's read the line from Knuth on the joy of going back over an almost completed document to insert the proper italic corrections, etc. should recognize that TeX is... well... not for everybody.
TeX is an amazing intellectual achievement, it produces great results (particularly when math is involved), and I personally use it to this day.... but it's vastly overkill for most documents and far beyond what the vast majority want to use or have learned to use. (A good friend of mine in college, while studying Computer Science and writing a compiler, once remarked: "I don't want to have to compile my term papers!", when I tried to advocate he use TeX. I honestly don't blame him... 'overfull hbox, badness 10000'?!?!?!)
On the other end of the spectrum, there's a lot to be said for the original Mac's ability to highlight text on the screen, select 18 point Geneva (or whavever) and then have the ImageWriter produce a low quality but accurate rendition of what appeared on the screen. As backward as the Mac's video model might have been in contrast to the Amiga, it offered a useful capability in that it was consistent with the model its printers used too.
> you'd be better served by something 80% as good, but 1/2 the price.
Not if you needed (or even just wanted) that last 20%.
> IIRC) much more dynamic memory management than Apple's
The Amiga scatter loader that both dynamically loaded and minimised fragmentation. If you were doing it "properly" and staying in OS, ie not hitting the hardware, there was one fixed address: ExecBase ($4) via which you'd find GfxBase, IntuitionBase and so on.
> Having used both machines, as well as an interlaced 1024x768 SVGA, I assure you, I do not want to use interlaced mode.
No one would. You bought either the superb 2080 Paperwhite long persistence monitor or a flicker fixer and multi sync.
So many missed opportunities by Commodore. :(
Speaking for myself, yes. :-)
Something I should point out here is that I grew up with reasonable access to both machines: Apple ][s and C64's. (My elementary school had a lab for each, across the hall from each other.) My exposure to the C64 was through a combination of my school's being in a Logo educational pilot program (based on Seymour Papert's work) and my mother running the C64 lab. That gave me some formal introduction to Logo in class, and then a bunch of after hours time, where I got a chance to explore further, including Commodore BASIC, setting the hardware up, etc.
This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths: the SID and the VIC II. Because I wasn't a personal machines (they were at the school), it also meant that I wasn't exactly buying things like extension BASICs and fast disk loaders.... so I'm biased towards feeling a bit more of the pain of the limited BASIC and slow disk interface. I still remember the disappointment trying to get graphics on the C64 screen in BASIC, given how easy it was in C64 Logo and in the Applesoft BASIC on the Apple ]['s across the hall.
I also tend, probably mostly thanks to my high school Physics teachers, to be more sympathetic towards the Apple ][ platform. While there's no doubt the C64 has better graphics and sounds (at least for games), I also saw some amazing things done with Apple ][ machines into the early 90's. My middle school had one with a Corvus hard disk and a barcode scanner that ran the library. My shop teacher had one with a plotter and a CAD system. My band directors used them to organize their operations. My physics teachers had an elaborate system for custom test generation and real-time grading, in addition to basic Sonar hardware (from a Polaroid camera) for supporting student experiments. So... while I'm very personally sympathetic to the Commodore 64, I do take objection to the notion that the C64 was uniformly 'far more powerful' than the Apple. (Which was why I made my initial response, in fact.)
Whatever additional power there is in the C64 can probably be explained by the fact that it's five years newer... and I still saw relatively standard Apple's doing things that still seem outside the capabilities of the C64.
Another way to look at this is that if you'd asked me then which platform I'd have chosen, there's not much doubt I would picked the Commodore. If you sent the current me back in time and then asked me to pick, I'd probably go with the Apple. As much as I like the built in hardware on the C64, I'd be hard pressed to walk away from Apple features like expansion slots, the faster disk, the 80 column display, AppleWorks, the standard way to get to 128K, etc.
This is this kind of thought process that has me objecting to the thesis that Apple has achieved its success solely by selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field. Even if it didn't spawn a demo scene, even if people aren't chasing the beam with cycle accurate 6510 code, the unique features the Apple did have seem more useful to me than any of that.
> So many missed opportunities by Commodore.
Agreed, without a doubt. (Starting with the 1541 disk performance, the keyboard on the PET, and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA. It's 2018, and there are still people worried about the water quality around the plant.)
My memory of Apple II is the expansion slots helped it stay relevant longer and it attracted a huge range of weird and wonderful add ons as a result. C64 was far more price sensitive which showed in some of the choices. Were it much more expensive it would have lost to one of the dozens of other 8 bits.
> This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths
My Amiga bias is less the amazing hardware, as that's always going to become outdated at some point, even though it was astonishing for its day. I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows and would be in a much better shape had we started with some of the Amiga and Mac OS choices and innovations accepted as the usual way of doing things.
Case in point in the OP: Mac's Applescript, or the earlier Amiga ARexx, rather than batch files and a big fat nothing in Windows.
I spent years finding every innovation on Windows had someone doing it far better a decade previously. Usually with an order of magnitude less code. Windows seemed comically lacking and gratuitously obnoxious to write code for. So of course that platform won for general computing.
Hindsight is easy of course.
> selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field
Macs were objectively better at so many things but lacked colour. In truth I always felt the reality distortion was on the Windows side. Much later Apple became a little too much focused on style but that's another story. :)
> and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA
Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory trash and rubble from demolished buildings was sent(!), were found highly hazardous decades later and required huge cleanups at EPA expense. IIRC one cleanup is still ongoing. I wish humanity could be encouraged to be more considerate of our planet.
Agreed... I tend to think MS did a very good job incorporating a grab bag of ideas into their products, but a very poor job doing the work to really make it all fit together.
Just one recent example of many is this bit on getting a status bar display of cursor location working in Notepad:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=...
tl;dr - The edit control, around for over thirty years, has no way to listen for cursor movement events. So they (meaning Microsoft itself) had to work around it by using a hack built around the accessibility API's...
> Didn't know of that.
The only reason I knew it is that years ago, after moving from Houston Philly, one of my first consulting clients was down the street from a shuttered 'GMT Microelectronics' factory (and some of my colleagues mentioned something about a water contamination issue). I looked a bit further into it and it turned out that 'GMT Microelectronics' was the successor of MOS Technologies, and the plant had been shut down due to leakage of basement chemical tanks into the water table.
Ironic that I wound up down the street from the remains of the company that had made such an impact on my early life and eventual career.
To close the Apple/Commodore link, it was also engineers behind the Commodore SID that spun off another local area company - Ensoniq. Apple then chose an Ensoniq sound chip for the IIgs. There is thus a very direct lineage between the audio capabilities of the C64 and those of the IIgs.
(And in the PC space, Tseng Labs of ET4000 fame was also local... and there's also Eniac, and the Eckert-Maunchly Computer Corporation lineage that wound up as Unisys. There really is a lot of local computer history around here.)
The question is: Was AmigaOS a "major" operating system that should be considered here. And I would say: Yes, during its time it was:
- It had millions of users, at least some percentage of them serious ones.
- It was used heavily in the TV industry
- For a long time it had the biggest online archive of public domain software and shareware (Aminet) of all contemporary platforms.
- Many of today's high-profile game developers started their career on the Amiga
and, back on-topic:
- It had something similar to AppleScript several years before the Mac. ARexx was available from 1987 and was shipped with the OS from 1990 on. Most commercial productivity software had an "ARexx port" and was scriptable in a uniform, system-wide manner.
On the other hand, systems like Smalltalk or the Lisp Machines, though way more powerful, were never really mainstream.
Sure... my main point is that it's overstating the case a bit to say that the C64 was strictly more powerful than the Apple ][ series. There were technical aspects of the Apple ][ series that were usefully more capable than the C64.
Other than that, what were the technical aspects of the Apple II (non-GS) that we should be aware of? The IIgs was a very nice machine, but it had to contend with the Amiga which easily outclassed it.
Where do the Plus-4 and C16 fit in? (Not to mention all of the 'Secret Weapons of Commodore' that they didn't manage to actually ship? As much as you talk about Apple hobbling the IIgs, it's not like they were the only company with unfulfilled potential from their engineering.)
(I did rather like the SX-64, though.)
> Other than that, what were the technical aspects of the Apple II (non-GS) that we should be aware of?
The machines could do some rather amazing things... by the time the early 90's rolled around, my high school Physics teachers had them generating custom tests for each student with integrated graphics for drawings, grading the tests in real time with an integrated scantron machine, and keeping all the class records on disk.
They got a lot of mileage out of some features made easier on the Apple. If I remember right, they had 1MB of RAM they were using and the test scanner plugged into an expansion card. They also swapped out the code to to disk to generate each question and draw the graphics... as they were generating the individualized tests for each student. For a 20 question test on a class of 20 that meant 400 disk read operations, so the faster disk I/O would've been useful to overall throughput. (They hacked a way to do partial loads of BASIC code into Applesoft by modifying the linked lists the interpreter used to maintain lines.) And I'm pretty sure they used a mouse and (80-col) double-hires mode to draw the graphics for the tests.
I'm not saying a C64 couldn't have done it, but the SID and the VIC II wouldn't have helped any, and there are a number of Apple ][ capabilities that did...