Bell & Howell Apple II update

It's not about fighiting or winning or losing, but rather about preventing rewriting of history, intentional or inadvertent, by skewing the relative timeline. This happens because people unwittingly take things out of context as you've perhaps done here. The discussion was about microcomputers and, specifically, the video connector on the Apple ][. When the Apple ][ came out, cable TV was not yet a common reality (That changed rapidly in the early '80's, but, in '77-'78, was not yet the case.) Video in this context, did not include notions like the VCR and set-top boxes, nor did it include other sorts of equipment that most folks outside the TV production industry had not even yet seen, simply because it was too costly for the microcomputing arena. Apple put the RCA jack on the back of their computer because (a) it was cheap, and (b) the signal wouldn't have to travel far. That way they ensured they could "get away" with that choice. They, and others in their field had to make choices on the basis of what things cost at the time. In the TV production studio equipment market, where things cost in the 5- or 6-figure price range, the presence of a connector that would cost on the order of $20 per connection point (remember what it cost to assemble the things!) didn't matter so much. BNC had been around for a long time, and so had the PL/SO-259. Both were capable of carrying wideband signals, and both cost about the same. Someone had made the choice, probably in the '50's, to use the latter in closed-circuit TV applications, and that's what one found on the back of most of the production monitors priced suitably for microcomputer applications in the '70's. As the term "video" came to mean what it does today, i.e. something that you see via TV equipment, the 'F' connector became the common connector of that market. I doubt the BNC is worse than the 'F' but the 'F' is quite a bit cheaper and offers the fact that it directly uses the center conductor of the cable as its medium rather than requiring a crimped or soldered center pin. I don't know that it makes a big difference in NTSC video, but in broadband transmission it probably does reduce discontinuities in the transmisison line. As far as reaching that "Aha!" to which you've referred, I'd have thought you'd at least have taken a peek at the ads in an old BYTE or Kilobaud mag of the '77 to '80 period, where you'd easily see what I meant. I've given away my old mag's from back then, though I still find 'em lying about. However, I have catalogs and other trade mags that I can look at. Looking at production studio video equipment wouldn't shed light on the subject, but looking the trade mag's for the microcomputer industry would do it. Being right in the sense of winning an argument isn't as important as having the facts straight when you get done. What bothers me about such remarks as the one that was originally made, sort-of on the line of, "our video lab had BNC connectors on all the equipment ..." might well have been quite correct, but it distorted the context, i.e. microcomputer video equipment and TV studio equipment were entirely different universes in the '70's. That it's changed should surprise noone, but skewing the timeline leads to conclusions such as how stupid it was to use one connector, when, in fact, the decision was made strictly on the basis of price and availability, and the relative cleverness of the underlying decision from an engineering standpoint was not a primary concern. (It leads to tiresome and inane complaints about how dumb it was to use a VAX when a Pentium III would have been so much better.) I seriously doubt that Jobs and Wozniak considered the BNC for more than about 1 microsecond because of cost, and other factors played no role at all. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Allain" <allain(a)panix.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2002 10:20 AM Subject: Re: Bell & Howell Apple II update