🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8400065@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>I think Apple has shot itself in the foot.
...
>Apple has made the same mistake as IBM!  And the blunder comes right
>after they watched IBM falter!  People resist PS/2's & the
>microchannel bus partly because they must throw away their AT/XT
>cards.  Now people can resist the SE/030 for the same reason!

I don't think the two situations are really comparable.  There aren't
nearly as many SE cards around as there are PC cards.  This is true
probably for two reasons: 1) the SE just hasn't been around as long as
the PC/AT/etc. 2) the SE is usable as shipped; you don't need to jam
2 or 3 cards in the thing just to make it operational, the way you do
with a PC. 

If you think about it, there are really relatively few cards offered
for that SE slot.  And a lot of those are accelerator cards and so
forth which aren't going to be useful in an SE/30 anyway.

I'd guess that out of the entire installed base of Mac SEs, 80-90%
have nothing in the slot.  In the PC world, ~100% of the machines have
one or more cards installed.  Hence bus incompatibility is a MUCH
larger problem for IBM than it is for Apple.

Besides, as I understand it, Apple didn't really have much choice in
the matter.  Because of the differences in CPU architecture, forcing
the SE/30 slot to be SE-compatible would have needlessly crippled the
machine.  Going with an incompatible slot was done for technical
reasons, not for marketing reasons, as I suspect was the case with
IBM's MCA.

----
Mark Vita                              ARPA: vita@ge-crd.ARPA
General Electric Company               UUCP: vita@desdemona.crd.ge.com
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