4 ms·

> You both seem to be enjoying the back and forth, Speaking for myself, yes. :-) Something I should point out here is that I grew up with reasonable access to

> You both seem to be enjoying the back and forth, Speaking for myself, yes. :-) Something I should point out here is that I grew up with reasonable access to both machines: Apple ][s and C64's. (My elementary school had a lab for each, across the hall from each other.) My exposure to the C64 was through a combination of my school's being in a Logo educational pilot program (based on Seymour Papert's work) and my mother running the C64 lab. That gave me some formal introduction to Logo in class, and then a bunch of after hours time, where I got a chance to explore further, including Commodore BASIC, setting the hardware up, etc. This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths: the SID and the VIC II. Because I wasn't a personal machines (they were at the school), it also meant that I wasn't exactly buying things like extension BASICs and fast disk loaders.... so I'm biased towards feeling a bit more of the pain of the limited BASIC and slow disk interface. I still remember the disappointment trying to get graphics on the C64 screen in BASIC, given how easy it was in C64 Logo and in the Applesoft BASIC on the Apple ]['s across the hall. I also tend, probably mostly thanks to my high school Physics teachers, to be more sympathetic towards the Apple ][ platform. While there's no doubt the C64 has better graphics and sounds (at least for games), I also saw some amazing things done with Apple ][ machines into the early 90's. My middle school had one with a Corvus hard disk and a barcode scanner that ran the library. My shop teacher had one with a plotter and a CAD system. My band directors used them to organize their operations. My physics teachers had an elaborate system for custom test generation and real-time grading, in addition to basic Sonar hardware (from a Polaroid camera) for supporting student experiments. So... while I'm very personally sympathetic to the Commodore 64, I do take objection to the notion that the C64 was uniformly 'far more powerful' than the Apple. (Which was why I made my initial response, in fact.) Whatever additional power there is in the C64 can probably be explained by the fact that it's five years newer... and I still saw relatively standard Apple's doing things that still seem outside the capabilities of the C64. Another way to look at this is that if you'd asked me then which platform I'd have chosen, there's not much doubt I would picked the Commodore. If you sent the current me back in time and then asked me to pick, I'd probably go with the Apple. As much as I like the built in hardware on the C64, I'd be hard pressed to walk away from Apple features like expansion slots, the faster disk, the 80 column display, AppleWorks, the standard way to get to 128K, etc. This is this kind of thought process that has me objecting to the thesis that Apple has achieved its success solely by selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field. Even if it didn't spawn a demo scene, even if people aren't chasing the beam with cycle accurate 6510 code, the unique features the Apple did have seem more useful to me than any of that. > So many missed opportunities by Commodore. Agreed, without a doubt. (Starting with the 1541 disk performance, the keyboard on the PET, and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA. It's 2018, and there are still people worried about the water quality around the plant.)

oldcynic 8y ago
Surprisingly similar story to my own, despite being the other side of the Atlantic and different hardware. School I went to was also piloting IT in schools, so we had a selection of 8 bit kit and an after hours club that was hugely popular. My memory of Apple II is the expansion slots helped it stay relevant longer and it attracted a huge range of weird and wonderful add ons as a result. C64 was far more price sensitive which showed in some of the choices. Were it much more expensive it would have lost to one of the dozens of other 8 bits. > This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths My Amiga bias is less the amazing hardware, as that's always going to become outdated at some point, even though it was astonishing for its day. I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows and would be in a much better shape had we started with some of the Amiga and Mac OS choices and innovations accepted as the usual way of doing things. Case in point in the OP: Mac's Applescript, or the earlier Amiga ARexx, rather than batch files and a big fat nothing in Windows. I spent years finding every innovation on Windows had someone doing it far better a decade previously. Usually with an order of magnitude less code. Windows seemed comically lacking and gratuitously obnoxious to write code for. So of course that platform won for general computing. Hindsight is easy of course. > selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field Macs were objectively better at so many things but lacked colour. In truth I always felt the reality distortion was on the Windows side. Much later Apple became a little too much focused on style but that's another story. :) > and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory trash and rubble from demolished buildings was sent(!), were found highly hazardous decades later and required huge cleanups at EPA expense. IIRC one cleanup is still ongoing. I wish humanity could be encouraged to be more considerate of our planet.
- mschaef 8y ago
  > I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows.... Agreed... I tend to think MS did a very good job incorporating a grab bag of ideas into their products, but a very poor job doing the work to really make it all fit together. Just one recent example of many is this bit on getting a status bar display of cursor location working in Notepad: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=... tl;dr - The edit control, around for over thirty years, has no way to listen for cursor movement events. So they (meaning Microsoft itself) had to work around it by using a hack built around the accessibility API's... > Didn't know of that. The only reason I knew it is that years ago, after moving from Houston Philly, one of my first consulting clients was down the street from a shuttered 'GMT Microelectronics' factory (and some of my colleagues mentioned something about a water contamination issue). I looked a bit further into it and it turned out that 'GMT Microelectronics' was the successor of MOS Technologies, and the plant had been shut down due to leakage of basement chemical tanks into the water table. Ironic that I wound up down the street from the remains of the company that had made such an impact on my early life and eventual career. To close the Apple/Commodore link, it was also engineers behind the Commodore SID that spun off another local area company - Ensoniq. Apple then chose an Ensoniq sound chip for the IIgs. There is thus a very direct lineage between the audio capabilities of the C64 and those of the IIgs. (And in the PC space, Tseng Labs of ET4000 fame was also local... and there's also Eniac, and the Eckert-Maunchly Computer Corporation lineage that wound up as Unisys. There really is a lot of local computer history around here.)

oldcynic 8y ago

Surprisingly similar story to my own, despite being the other side of the Atlantic and different hardware. School I went to was also piloting IT in schools, so we had a selection of 8 bit kit and an after hours club that was hugely popular. My memory of Apple II is the expansion slots helped it stay relevant longer and it attracted a huge range of weird and wonderful add ons as a result. C64 was far more price sensitive which showed in some of the choices. Were it much more expensive it would have lost to one of the dozens of other 8 bits. > This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths My Amiga bias is less the amazing hardware, as that's always going to become outdated at some point, even though it was astonishing for its day. I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows and would be in a much better shape had we started with some of the Amiga and Mac OS choices and innovations accepted as the usual way of doing things. Case in point in the OP: Mac's Applescript, or the earlier Amiga ARexx, rather than batch files and a big fat nothing in Windows. I spent years finding every innovation on Windows had someone doing it far better a decade previously. Usually with an order of magnitude less code. Windows seemed comically lacking and gratuitously obnoxious to write code for. So of course that platform won for general computing. Hindsight is easy of course. > selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field Macs were objectively better at so many things but lacked colour. In truth I always felt the reality distortion was on the Windows side. Much later Apple became a little too much focused on style but that's another story. :) > and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory trash and rubble from demolished buildings was sent(!), were found highly hazardous decades later and required huge cleanups at EPA expense. IIRC one cleanup is still ongoing. I wish humanity could be encouraged to be more considerate of our planet.

mschaef 8y ago
> I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows.... Agreed... I tend to think MS did a very good job incorporating a grab bag of ideas into their products, but a very poor job doing the work to really make it all fit together. Just one recent example of many is this bit on getting a status bar display of cursor location working in Notepad: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=... tl;dr - The edit control, around for over thirty years, has no way to listen for cursor movement events. So they (meaning Microsoft itself) had to work around it by using a hack built around the accessibility API's... > Didn't know of that. The only reason I knew it is that years ago, after moving from Houston Philly, one of my first consulting clients was down the street from a shuttered 'GMT Microelectronics' factory (and some of my colleagues mentioned something about a water contamination issue). I looked a bit further into it and it turned out that 'GMT Microelectronics' was the successor of MOS Technologies, and the plant had been shut down due to leakage of basement chemical tanks into the water table. Ironic that I wound up down the street from the remains of the company that had made such an impact on my early life and eventual career. To close the Apple/Commodore link, it was also engineers behind the Commodore SID that spun off another local area company - Ensoniq. Apple then chose an Ensoniq sound chip for the IIgs. There is thus a very direct lineage between the audio capabilities of the C64 and those of the IIgs. (And in the PC space, Tseng Labs of ET4000 fame was also local... and there's also Eniac, and the Eckert-Maunchly Computer Corporation lineage that wound up as Unisys. There really is a lot of local computer history around here.)