🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <203@druil.UUCP> lat@druil.UUCP (TepperL) writes:
>
>But NOOOOOOOO!
>
>Instead, Apple locked people into a proprietary "bus" (if that's what
>one chooses to call it) when they couldn't deliver the goods: hard
>disks) for well over a year, a SECOND floppy for months.  That hurt
>us and it hurt Apple.  The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) has
>burned many a company.
>
>There's only one company in the world that can dare to try locking
>customers into its products, and that's IBM.  I don't like it, but
>it's a FACT.
>
>-- 
>Larry Tepper	    {ihnp4 | allegra}!drutx!druil!lat	+1-303-538-1759

While I think that Mr.Tepper's points about the value of having an
accessible, "standard" bus are quite correct, I think it may be hasty
to blame Apple overmuch for the decision.

Apple made a machine with slots long before they made the Mac, the
II series.  It gave them incredible headaches because people would
buy discount interface cards, or even premium quality cards and then
discover that their favorite software wouldn't run (I for instance
could not use both an ALS Dispatcher serial card and Softech
UCSD p-System simultaneously, without significant patches to the 
p-System).  Jobs apparently hated this problem and his decisions on the
Mac reflect it.  The Mac is supposed to be easy to use, complex
interactions between cards, OS, and software are not a feature of an
easy to use machine.  So . . . the Mac has a complex set of requirements
for how software is supposed to work that should make software independent
of machine version and the machine is closed.

The result has been difficulty penetrating the corporate market and years
of poor hard disk performance (serial ports are slow).  However, because
almost all commercial software adheres to the standards set by Apple and
because some of it is very good, it is very difficult to successfully 
market software that does not adhere to the standards.  This might
not have been the case if the Mac had been open from the start.  Also,
since it has been impossible to add an 8086 card, the Mac has had to viewed
as standing apart from the Clone Crowd.  Is this good? Is this bad?
Ask me or John Sculley in five-ten years.

Ethan Munson
UCB CS Grad Student
munson@ernie.berkeley.edu