5 ms·

> Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were

> Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. Whoa, calm down there partner. I wasn't trying to claim it was necessarily an intentional choice to buck the common trend at the time (although my word choice does sort of suggest that), but rather that with the benefit of retrospect, it does fit the pattern. I'm not super familiar with the tech climate at the time, but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact. So, Apple at least chose not to do that. Again, not trying to make any moralistic judgements here. I just thought it was interesting.

skissane 8y ago
> but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact At the time, I don't think it was clear that the IBM PC was going to be a big deal. The PC was not IBM's first foray into personal computing, and its previous offerings in this area (such as the 5120 and the Datamaster) were not particularly successful. The PC was much more successful because IBM learned from its mistakes – it used mainstream/commodity parts in preference to IBM-proprietary ones, which saved it money, and then used that to enable a lower (and more competitive) price point. But, were people expecting that from IBM? Probably not, it was a deviation from IBM's previous behaviour, it was a surprise. Now, as 1982 and 1983 rolled on, it became increasingly clear that the IBM PC was a success. But by then, Macintosh development was already well advanced, and they'd already locked in to incompatible designs. Trying to go back and redesign for increased IBM PC compatibility would have just delayed them even further, and a further delayed Macintosh might not have been as successful. Plus, increased IBM PC compatibility might have meant things like 5.25 inch disks, which would have been less user-friendly. (PCs didn't get 3.5 inch disks until later.)
vidarh 8y ago
At the time, at least the Amiga and Macintosh both still looked like possible viable contenders, and part of the reason for making different choices was that it was done to justify buying a different platform. If you first sacrificed PC compatibility, then you had very little reason to stick to e.g. PC format floppies etc. if you could do better (the Amiga also had it's own format - 880KB; though tools like "crossdos" let you mount and read/write PC formatted floppies). That accounts for a lot of the quirks of these platforms. Another aspect was that the market was much more fragmented. The Mac "owned" the desktop publishing segment at one time due simply to Quark Xpress. The Amiga and Atari ST owned the 16bit part of the hobbyist/game market in Europe, and the Amiga owned the video/graphics effects market for some time thanks to the VideoToaster etc.. Interoperability was not as much of a concern yet. People were used to a highly fragmented market with no clear single winner where you picked different platforms for different tools. It was first a few years into the 90's that this really changed and the PC emerged as a clear enough winner that people started investing a lot in interop.
DanBC 8y ago
> but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, Maybe. But then we still had machines like the Amstrad PCW. > Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. [...] > All models except the last included the Locoscript word processing program, the CP/M Plus operating system, Mallard BASIC and the LOGO programming language at no extra cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

skissane 8y ago

> but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact At the time, I don't think it was clear that the IBM PC was going to be a big deal. The PC was not IBM's first foray into personal computing, and its previous offerings in this area (such as the 5120 and the Datamaster) were not particularly successful. The PC was much more successful because IBM learned from its mistakes – it used mainstream/commodity parts in preference to IBM-proprietary ones, which saved it money, and then used that to enable a lower (and more competitive) price point. But, were people expecting that from IBM? Probably not, it was a deviation from IBM's previous behaviour, it was a surprise. Now, as 1982 and 1983 rolled on, it became increasingly clear that the IBM PC was a success. But by then, Macintosh development was already well advanced, and they'd already locked in to incompatible designs. Trying to go back and redesign for increased IBM PC compatibility would have just delayed them even further, and a further delayed Macintosh might not have been as successful. Plus, increased IBM PC compatibility might have meant things like 5.25 inch disks, which would have been less user-friendly. (PCs didn't get 3.5 inch disks until later.)

vidarh 8y ago

At the time, at least the Amiga and Macintosh both still looked like possible viable contenders, and part of the reason for making different choices was that it was done to justify buying a different platform. If you first sacrificed PC compatibility, then you had very little reason to stick to e.g. PC format floppies etc. if you could do better (the Amiga also had it's own format - 880KB; though tools like "crossdos" let you mount and read/write PC formatted floppies). That accounts for a lot of the quirks of these platforms. Another aspect was that the market was much more fragmented. The Mac "owned" the desktop publishing segment at one time due simply to Quark Xpress. The Amiga and Atari ST owned the 16bit part of the hobbyist/game market in Europe, and the Amiga owned the video/graphics effects market for some time thanks to the VideoToaster etc.. Interoperability was not as much of a concern yet. People were used to a highly fragmented market with no clear single winner where you picked different platforms for different tools. It was first a few years into the 90's that this really changed and the PC emerged as a clear enough winner that people started investing a lot in interop.

DanBC 8y ago

> but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, Maybe. But then we still had machines like the Amstrad PCW. > Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. [...] > All models except the last included the Locoscript word processing program, the CP/M Plus operating system, Mallard BASIC and the LOGO programming language at no extra cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW