> then you should include the C128/C128D. Where do the Plus-4 and C16 fit in? (Not to mention all of the 'Secret Weapons of Commodore' that they didn't manage

> then you should include the C128/C128D. Where do the Plus-4 and C16 fit in? (Not to mention all of the 'Secret Weapons of Commodore' that they didn't manage to actually ship? As much as you talk about Apple hobbling the IIgs, it's not like they were the only company with unfulfilled potential from their engineering.) (I did rather like the SX-64, though.) > Other than that, what were the technical aspects of the Apple II (non-GS) that we should be aware of? The machines could do some rather amazing things... by the time the early 90's rolled around, my high school Physics teachers had them generating custom tests for each student with integrated graphics for drawings, grading the tests in real time with an integrated scantron machine, and keeping all the class records on disk. They got a lot of mileage out of some features made easier on the Apple. If I remember right, they had 1MB of RAM they were using and the test scanner plugged into an expansion card. They also swapped out the code to to disk to generate each question and draw the graphics... as they were generating the individualized tests for each student. For a 20 question test on a class of 20 that meant 400 disk read operations, so the faster disk I/O would've been useful to overall throughput. (They hacked a way to do partial loads of BASIC code into Applesoft by modifying the linked lists the interpreter used to maintain lines.) And I'm pretty sure they used a mouse and (80-col) double-hires mode to draw the graphics for the tests. I'm not saying a C64 couldn't have done it, but the SID and the VIC II wouldn't have helped any, and there are a number of Apple ][ capabilities that did...