[rescue] newest rescue

[Nathan Raymond]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3 February 2016 at 13:07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
> > In article <CAPFCoitX2OtQ0XpVi7WwzwS0KaRbh5VGYhbUChgOvGMWr+=
> EpQ at mail.gmail.com>,
> >     John Hudak <jjhudak at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> As an addendum to my own post, in comparison to Sun, Apple had used the
> >> 680xx cpus but, in comparison, they were making 'toys'... [...]
> >
> > It also had cooperative multi-tasking.  MacOS didn't get true
> > pre-emptive multi-tasking until OS X, IIRC.
>
> From what I remember, the early 68k-based Macs were also hobbled in
> the sense that Jobs demanded that the CPU do everything.  (I heard
> that he wanted to keep the chip-count down and was fanatical about
> simplicity.)  As such, peripheral chips were not introduced until he
> left.
>

I think you're conflating a few things here. Perhaps the biggest reason for
the Apple II's success was the Woz-designed floppy drive electronics. He
took the Shugart 5.25 mechanism and ignored the then-standard electronics
and controller and designed his own very efficient solution using far few
chips that stored more data on the same disks and was faster. The only
downside to Woz's designs were that they tended to be so uniquely elegant
that few other engineers could understand them, so later on at Apple there
were people who were tasked with redesigning some of Woz's chips so they
could be understood by more engineers and make production easier.

Jobs was fanatical about a number of things, and one of them in the '80s
was fans, he did not like them and didn't want Apple computers to have
them. Convection cooling some of the systems was challenging. In the case
of the Apple ///, it was critical, because RAM chips ended up not being
available in the density they wanted for the original design and shipped
the system with more RAM chips than originally planned. Lacking a fan, the
extra heat caused enough internal component expansion for the chips to
de-seat themselves from the sockets over time. The flakiness of the
original Apple /// was eventually fixed with a hardware revision, but by
then the perception was that the Apple /// was unreliable.

For a while Jobs also didn't like anything that required the user to open
up the computer, so he was against memory expansion or expansion slots,
which is why the original Mac 128k lacks those things. The Mac II with all
it's expansion slots was a Jean Louis Gassee (not a Jobs) project. After
the Mac 128k Jobs was pretty much out of the picture at Apple due to the
whole Scully situation.

- Nate