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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

"Freedom" is just a marketing element for Apple when they were still an underdog in the market. Jobs was never a real proponent of Freedom in computing anyway. The Mac had even its proprietary connectors at the time, and did not use any of the standards available. You were "free" to buy your peripherals only at official Mac resellers.

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The Mini-DIN (the main connector on moist early Macs) wasn't proprietary. Isn't it still what PCs use to connect the mouse & keyboard?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-DIN_connector

Even the 128k Mac had mostly standards-based connectors.

Mouse port, 1 eight-bit keyboard bus, 300 baud, RJ11 connector for the Macintosh Keyboard. Two RS-232/RS-422 serial ports, 230.4K baud maximum, DB-9 connector, and sound port for external audio amplifier or headphones.

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/computers/mac.html

The early Macs used ADB (Apple Desktop Bus), which uses a 4-pin mini-DIN as its physical connector. PCs use PS/2, which uses a 6-pin mini-DIN. They're not compatible at all.

True, but DIN is about as standard as it gets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-din

But DIN is just the physical connector.

So what? Being a standard connector made it easy to repair the connector. What more would you want? Implement the ADB ASIC? Why on earth would you have done that instead of licensing from Apple?

Because that's the whole point of an open protocol -- hackers can design new interfaces not imagined by the original designer.

That's what API design is so important, and so difficult. By analogy the DIN connector is simply calling convention and ADB the actual function calls.

I'm not sure I follow you. ADB was ahead of its time, and a precursor to USB, but nobody's claiming it was an open protocol. What was important from an electrical engineer's POV was that the connector could be replaced using off-the-shelf parts. That was because the connector was standard. If you wanted to develop for Apple, you had to own a company and strike a deal with Apple. Not so easy, but certainly possible.

Now, if you just wanted to hack peripheral hardware at the time, you would have invested in a lot cheaper (expendable) computer with a standard serial / parallel port, so I don't really understand what you are saying.

> Even the 128k Mac had mostly standards-based connectors...DB-9 connector...

By the way it's a DE-9 connector (a DB-9 would be huge with lots of empty space). I know many people say "DB-9" when they mean the smaller connector, but then again many people say "narrowband"as the opposite of "broadband" when they really mean "baseband" -- just trying to make up words to sound sophisticated. Yes, even Apple marketing...

Because most people use broadband in a place where wideband should be used.

In my little social circle - any discussion that becomes overly detail oriented (focusing on details over the core argument) has been dubbed a 'DE-9' discussion.

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