1 Aug
2021
1 Aug
'21
12:21 p.m.
On Sun, 1 Aug 2021, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
Would the 68K have succeeded if it were not for Apple
and Commodore?
Without your engineering expertise, I would still say, "YES".
(I was reading Infoworld, etc., as compared to you designing the machines)
Before we heard anything about Apple picking it, and before any sort of
announcements of such, the first that I ever heard about the 68000 was,
"Hey! check this out! This is gonna be the BEST 16 bit processor. I hope
that somebody builds a machine around it SOON. Anybody who wants to
design THE BEST machine from scratch, rather than just add kludges on top
of kludges would have to use it. 'Course, they'd have to re-write all the
software from scratch, and that would make it slow to get market share."
The Intel approach of each one being based closely on the previous meant
that the 5150 had software VERY fast. For example, Wordstar was up and
running in weeks, but then was delayed while the user manual got
rewritten. Supercalc was very soon.
OTOH, when the Lisa, and then Mac, came out, Apple was smart enough to
provide basic software. I heard a story at the time that it was ordained
that "the Mac will be shipped with FOUR software packeages", but that the
four ended up finally being MacWrite, MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacPaint.
Third party software took much longer than it had for the 5150, because it
had to be written, not just patched from a previous iteration.
'Course, the 6502 marketing of "First one's free" sort of made it almost
inevitable for homebrew bootstrap such as Apple1 and Apple2.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com