Skipware level, late 2012

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 12:26 PM, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote: Networking is a bit of a stretch for "home toy machines", but even a 128K Mac came with AppleTalk/LocalTalk from day one. It didn't take off right away, but the support was there for it. I'd say it became a useful, desirable feature once the Apple Laserwriter I came out - a built-in network to share a $5000 resource with every Mac in the room. As for multitasking OS, I'd have to trot out the Amiga in 1985. Completely derided as a "toy machine" by both the PC and Mac crowds, again, from day one, multitasking OS. I can't find a reference to the original quote, but sometime around 1985 or 1986, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were deflecting calls for each of their products to support "true" multitasking (vs the existing "Switcher" or "TSR" mechanisms that let you push one app to the side to run another in the foreground) with claims that you "couldn't do it" on a machine that had less than 2MB (that being more than most people had in front of them at the time). At the time, my interpretation was more along the lines of "it's too hard to wedge our code onto the machines of today, so you'll get it when we get around to doing it and after you buy bigger hardware". The end result was the same - eventually, machines got larger, code got larger, too, but desktop multitasking OSes are the norm. -ethan