Branching the thread away from Compaq deskpro boards: "What We Have Lost"

[Fred Cisin]

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