On Fri, 22 Nov 2013 14:56:45 Brian May wrote:
On 22 November 2013 14:33, Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
Really????? !!! I am amazed! ... what a long way has Apple travelled since!! .... trying to imagine a similar instr. manual for an ipad!!
From memory, you could get full technical details of the Apple II, as well.
I think it wasn't until the Macintosh that they started heading for closed systems.
IBM went the open approach and as a result had a lot of competition with cheap clones, sometimes of questionable quality or incompatible features.
My understanding is that IBM was somewhat open due to having some anti-trust cases against them in the 70's. Even so they didn't directly allow competition (EG by publishing specs for all BIOS calls and PC-DOS interfaces) but the BIOS had a clean-room reimplementation. I believe that the use of MS- DOS and CP/M on the IBM-PC was due to anti-trust cases, if MS-DOS hadn't beaten CP/M then we'd probably be using PCs designed for some sort of 32bit CP/M variant (which probably wouldn't be much different from MS-DOS). If IBM had been allowed to ship their own OS and no other OS then there wouldn't have been much competition.
The result was that IBM didn't get the sales they hoped for. Macintosh got the reputation of being more reliable, no compatibility issues, while being more expensive. So they didn't get the sales they hoped for either. The winner was the cheap IBM compatible computers.
The Mac was only compatible with other Macs. Not so compatible with other systems. One of the jokes about the movie "Independence Day" was that they had a Mac which can't talk to any other computer on earth talking to alien computers.
IIRC, Macintosh also had the advantage of having an OS providing an API to a range of services, not just a disk API. This was before I even heard of OS/2 or Windows. Which in turn meant Applications had to support all the possible variations in hardware support.
Yes having a proper OS was a real advantage. But Windows and OS/2 both had the same benefits along with memory protection to enforce them before the Mac had memory protection. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/