AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer (2015)
michaeljmahon.com
michaeljmahon.com
I really don't like the IIgs's design.
http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/wdc_w65c832_preliminary_m...
The part was never produced, in large part because Apple wasn't interested in continuing the IIgs line.
That's how you make the small things, just, unforgettable.
Then they learned nothing.
The one big mistake Woz made when designing Apple II was picking the MOS 6502 CPU. It made sense at the time, because for the price it was the technically best chip available. The problem was that the company that made it was in serious trouble for multiple reasons.[0] Soon after the Apple II was released, MOS had to accept a low bid buyout offer from Commodore to not go bankrupt, and as Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel absolutely loathed to spend money on literally anything, this basically ended future development of the line.
[0](Mainly, terrible IP practices. MOS was founded because a Motorola engineer recognized a huge market niche that Motorola was poorly serving, and despite repeated pleas to the management, they chose not to do anything. So he set out with a few co-conspirators to found a new chip company to serve that market. However, he chose to design his chip to be way too similar to 6800 that Motorola was already making, and immediately after release Motorola sued them for stealing the design. During discovery, it was found that at MOS there were internal technical manuals related to the Motorola chip that were Motorola property and that the founders took with them when they left. Motorola won, took basically all of the profit that MOS had made, but allowed the company to continue operating.)
It was the cheapest chip on the market. It was faster than its competition, and also used by Atari, Commodore and, later across the Atlantic, on the Acorn/BBC computers. It's one of the most popular 8-bit architectures. While Commodore never invested much in upgrading the 6502 into 16 and 32 bits, they invested a lot in other developments. Too little and too late, the 65CE02-derived chip in the C65 was quite impressive for an 8-bit CPU.
> While Commodore never invested much in upgrading the 6502 into 16 and 32 bits, they invested a lot in other developments. Too little and too late, the 65CE02-derived chip in the C65 was quite impressive for an 8-bit CPU.
Not during Tramiel's reign they didn't. The man was famously averse to spending a single cent he didn't have to. He didn't believe in the concept of budgets, so he preferred to have to personally okay every single expenditure. If that caused work to stall when he wasn't available to do so, well, that was just the cost of doing business...
When he bought MOS, with it he got perhaps the world's best silicon design team. He promptly chased them away by denying them a bonus they felt they deserved, and after that the only development on the CPU line was for cost-cutting. It was only after he stormed off in 1984 that Commodore got back into CPU development.
In 1995 I was given the task of making some posters (or something like that) on a Macintosh. I think it was an SE. The thing would constantly pop up error messages with codes: Error 14345. And nothing else.
I had a nightmare in which popups would open faster than I could close them.
I had used Fleet Street Editor on a BBC Micro. It was slow and laborious, but much more solid to use.
We also had an SE in the early 90s, it didn't seem more prone to crashes than any other computer I've ever used.
I still think they should've named the 2nd gen iPhone SE the SE/30, BTW.