stepping machanism of Apple Disk ][ drive (was Re: Heatkit 51/4 floppies) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

11 Apr 1999

In all the time I was involved in the microcomputer industry, I never saw a
single Commodore ad that wasn't printed in a trade publication of some sort.
Most of those that I saw were German, though some I saw were in French or
Italian, but I couldn't read them.  That by itself indicates there wasn't
much doing with them.  I once read that they had a digital watch switch
patent that made them more dough than all their computer-related activities
combined.  I didn't find that hard to believe.

The way in which the Apple computer "won" the schools over was to donate a
significant number to each school system with whom they thought they could
do some business.  Once they were on the Apple path, they were too
short-sighted to see it would ultimately lead to much higher costs.

For a number of years I served as a member of various committees at the
middle school my sons attended.  The impression I got was that there were
darned few teachers and school administrators smart enough or experienced
enough to realize that the "cheap" deal they were getting on their computers
were all based on pricing when the products were newly entered in the
market, and at maximal cost.  Later on, they'd be paying double or triple
what they could on the local economy.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Cameron Kaiser &lt;ckaiser(a)oa.ptloma.edu&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Sunday, April 11, 1999 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: stepping machanism of Apple Disk ][ drive (was Re: Heatkit 51/4
floppies)

...
 ::I don't think Commodore was a factor in this
aspect of the process.  The
::Commodore machines weren't "accessible" enough, in that there was no
really
...
 ::convenient way to install the additional hardware
people wanted, so nobody
...
 ::(well, almost) built it.

I disagree very strongly with that statement (in a nice way :-). Apples
definitely had a nice selection of hardware add-ons, but there were also
C64 80-column cards (Batteries Included made some), hard drives (first the
Lt. Kernal, then the CMD series), RAM expansions (first the Commodore REUs
and then BBGRAM, RAMLink, geoRAM), modems (first Commodore VICMODEMS and
1600 series, then HesModem, Mighty Mo, etc.), printer interfaces (Cardco,
Xetec; even some Centronics ones) and accelerators (TurboMaster, Flash-8
and SuperCPU). Many compared quite favourably with the Apple's assortment.
Moreover, the Commodore hardware has always been superbly documented --
witness the Programmer's Reference Guides on all the major 8-bit Commodores
and even the minor ones like the 264 series (Plus/4, etc.). Granted, this
translated more into better designed software rather than expanded hardware,
...
 but the 64 definitely had its fair share.

::They couldn't afford a market clash with the Apple.  They had a safe market
...
 ::in Europe, which didn't seem to suffer as badly
from the video-toy-looking
...
 ::Apple as their U.S. market did.  By the time all the
goodies were installed,
...
 ::the Apple became a formidable presence to be reckoned
with by nearly any
::computer maker.  The Apples were unduly costly, but they exhibited an
::unprecedented breadth of applications with more variety of plug-in
::peripherals than even an S-100 box offered.

But they didn't market-clash with the Apple except possibly in the education
...
 market, which Apple soundly won (depending on whom you
talk to, this is
either attributed to Apple's aggressiveness or Commodore's passivity).
Apple
...
 may have been trying for the home market at one stage,
but they never made
any offerings that could be explicitly marked "home computer". The Apple
IIs
...
 were more business computers that happened to play some
games, while (PETs
excepted) Commodore made home computers that happened to run some business
applications, IMHO. I've always perceived them operating in just about
separate worlds precisely *because* of the Apple's inclination towards
hardware expansion and the 64's towards software expansion (see the 64 demo
scene for an example of this), which breeds quick market separation because
any emergent applications will be totally differently focused.

--
-------------------------- personal page: 
http://calvin.ptloma.edu/~spectre/ --
...
 Cameron Kaiser                     Database
Programmer/Administrative Computing
...
 Point Loma Nazarene University                         
   Fax: +1 619 849 2581
...
 ckaiser(a)ptloma.edu                                     
 Phone: +1 619 849 2539
...
 -- A dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog. --
Alfred Kahn --------------