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I had an Apple ][ in my youth, I still feel that that was the last true Apple. I do admit they did an impressive thing or two in the meantime but nothing compar
by zwieback 4y ago
I had an Apple ][ in my youth, I still feel that that was the last true Apple. I do admit they did an impressive thing or two in the meantime but nothing compares to the ][
- mepian 4y agoI think with HyperCard and the Macintosh II that spirit of early Apple was preserved, well until the later releases of Mac OS X when open standards like OpenGL were de-emphasized and Code Signing became enforced by default.
- joezydeco 4y agoTotally agree. Part of the magic of the Apple ][ was that BASIC was burned into the ROM and ready to go without loading any other software. I always wondered what the Mac would have been like if HyperCard been shipped as an onboard piece of software.
- retrocryptid 4y agoYup. Built in BASIC was the norm for all those late 70s / early 80s machines. Didn't the first couple of IBM PC models have a cut down ROM BASIC? It's apparently popular to disrespect BASIC now that we have gigahertz 64-bit machines with gigabytes of RAM and terabyte solid state drives on our desktops. But when you think about what you could do on a 6502 machine with a frigging 256 byte stack... hella props for the folk that made that work. But yeah... I think by the mid 80s, most people really just wanted to run a few games, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet. The idea computer buyers may want to write their own code was fading fast. HyperCard had one or two warts, but it was definitely functional and you could do a lot with a small amount of effort. Also... the way you learned it seemed very exploratory. You had to learn a few basics, but after that it was hard-core experimentation and remixing. I bought an old PowerBook 160 recently explicitly to run MPW and HyperCard. Mostly to remember what the old world was like.
- joezydeco 4y agoI think the experimentation is what we've lost and miss but can't explain. Imagine an alternate world where people tinkered in HyperCard and eventually the code evolved to be network-aware, and we all wrote in HyperTalk and not HTML. And then that became the web. I think Atkinson even acknowledges that this was a huge missed opportunity.
- retrocryptid 4y agoAlas, Apple would never have allowed that to happen.
- retrocryptid 4y agoI grok you. I think it's cause the Apple ][ was built for experimenters and builders. The Lisa, despite being an amazing example of what early 80s tech could do, was made for "business people." It made the things that business people wanted to do easy. If it made things that young tech geeks like me wanted to do easy, that was an accident. The Mac was intended to be a machine that people could write apps for, or at least that's what people said after they started distributing dev kits for it. But the way it evolved is definitely more authoritarian than anything in the Apple ][ world.