[clue-tech] Apple Switching to Intel

[marcus hall]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:20:20PM -0600, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> While the AppleII might have been a competitive machine, it certainly
> wasn't revolutionary.  My bottom line is that as a business decision
> the proprietary hardware route just wasn't the right one at that time.
>  It's amazing how many times companies have to learn the
> proprietary-is-bad lesson.

I think that I have to take issue with this statement.  At the time that
the AppleII came out, most of the world was not particularly proprietary.
The S-100 bus was probably the only "standard", but that bus structure
was heavily influenced by the 8080 architecture, and Apple's 6502 processor
wouldn't really fit it too well.  Plus, the S-100 form factor was big
and expensive compared to AppleII's targets.

The AppleII manual had the schematics for the main board and source code
for the monitor ROM included.  How much more "Open Source" can you get?

Remember, at the time there were Altair, IMSAI, Cromemco, (and my favorite
Poly-88), and a few others producing S-100 bus systems, the SWTPC 6800,
Challenger, and a few others.  Not too long after the AppleII came the
TRS-80.  The 8-bit microprocessor had only been around for a few years!

Marcus Hall
marcus at tuells.org