Legitimacy of the Ten Year Rule.

On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Bill Yakowenko wrote: With cars, each year's model had some distinguishing feature from the model before and after. So that's why people rave about a '56 Chevy, and not a '55 or a '58. With computers, there wasn't much difference between the first year's run and the last year's run. Taking an Apple //e for example, there were about four major variations during its lifetime (of about 10 years in production). But nobody really distinguishes between the first three. The only thing that changed from the first one to the second was the color of the keycaps and some minor motherboard revisions, and from the second to the third you had some ROM changes, additional characters added to the character set, and a CPU upgrade. It only really changed significantly (superficially mostly) when the Platinum //e came out with the extended keyboard (with numeric keypad). The Coco 2 had many different design variations during its life cycle, but people generally just say "I have a CoCo2", not "I have a June 1982 CoCo2 with the low-profile keyboard and the Rev B1 motherboard" [these are just made up characteristics...I know nothing of the CoCo2 save for the visible outward differences I see amongst the handful I have]. The point is many computers had minor design changes over the years that computer nerds don't tend to make a big deal about since the computer basically worked the same. Car collectors go to great pains to memorize all the differences in models from year to year because those changes were delineated by year boundaries that as a result are easy to categorize. Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 01/15/99]