by botchtowersociety 61 Replies latest jw friends
When he came home from school he did a little charity sign and asked if he could go and collect money for Steve's family as they would be in need now he had died. I had to explain that although they were sad they had plenty of money and they didn't need a collection.
That is GORGEOUS!!!!
Farkel wrote:
Me too. I paid $7,800 for an Apple II with two floppy drives 520K of storage as I recall and a Spinwriter printer with a whopping 58 characters per second print speed!
When my Apple II signed on, it showed 64 k of memory "free". Today, 54 k which is 54,000 wouldn't even boot up a modern computer. The sign-on memory today is more like 3,000,000,000 bytes rather than 54,000.
Amazing. That was state-of-the-art back in the late 1970's, early 1980's.
I think I paid less than half that for mine. 32K Apple was $1200. I think I paid $500 for my first floppy drive, $250 for the second. Maybe $800 for a wide-carriage OKIDATA printer. I upgraded the memory up to 48K along the way too. Forget how much that was. All the drives were the 16-sector ones for AppleDOS 3.3, not the 13-sector ones.
BTW, I doubt your Apple ever said 64K free. The Apple ][ only had 16-bit addressing and the upper 16K was reserved for ROM BIOS. 48K was the most you'd have free or that your BIOS would report. Might have changed with the //e. The only way to get above 48K of free memory was to buy a card and use special I/O instructions on that card to make it take up the memory space of the ROM addresses. Which also meant you couldn't interact with that memory and do calls to ROM functions at the same time. Was a bit of a mess to use. Not good to have code on your 16K card, but sufficed for other memory storage.
I've been mixed about Apple over the years.
The Apple ][ was my first computer (bought from paper route money at age 13). I wrote all kinds of things on it, including 6502 assembly and 8080 with a Z80 card. It was truly remarkable for me and taught me a lot. And at that time, it was ahead of what most people had. Radio Shack's TRS-80 was a competitor and maybe even better. As fun as it was, the Apple seemed short-sighted. The screen was only 40 characters wide when 80 characters was standard for a typewriter and other computing terminals. It didn't even have lower case letters. And, of course, software had to get around those quirks in ugly ways. Imagine a word processor where you're typing up a paper on a screen that can't display a whole line without scrolling and can't show you lower-cased letters. Other computers of the time were a standard 80 characters. VT-100 terminals were and had upper/lower case. Even had additional keys like function keys. I didn't like the minimalism (which is also apparent with the iPhone).
I played with a first generation mac for a bit and wasn't impressed. There weren't a lot of good programming tools for it.
After that, I went more the PC route and watched Apple from a distance. It really almost dissappeared. If you're talking Mac vs. PC, the PC I always liked more, Microsoft and all. I'm not the dumb sort of user impressed by pretty and dumbed-down choices. I don't want a check-engine light OS. I'm a power user. I want to see more. I want more tools available to me to accomplish what I need to do.
So many more tools available for developers on a PC as well. To anybody I engaged in a Mac vs. PC argument, all I had to do was tell them to go to their local software store and look at how many aisles were dedicated to PC software and how many there were for Mac (IF they had one, it was sometimes no more than a shelf). Being that many Apple people are users, not programmers, that means you're going to buy your own software. Nice to have a wide selection.
Ever hear a fortune 500 company say they're running their database server off of an Apple? Their web server? Yeah, me neither.
Another issue with Mac is it's been so proprietary. Everything you want practically has to come from Apple. Their new OS is Intel based, but won't run on a lot of PCs (and I'm sure it's coded to dectect their machines) because they want you to buy from Apple at exorbitant prices. I can buy a cheap Intel laptop for under $500. I think the last OS release from Apple was about $30. I could have an Apple OS running for around $500. But no, you have to buy an Apple laptop for over $1000.
The iPhone is locked so you can't buy apps from anybody but Apple (unless you jailbreak it). You're subject to what Apple allows and deems appropriate. No freedom of choice. And for people who want that locked-in, I'm taking care of you, safe feeling, fine. I'm not that person. And (haven't tried it with the new OS), but the iPhone browser doesn't even do flash. Even Safari on an intel machine doesn't do so well. I use Firefox on my Apples.
The iPhone is great because it has such a huge variety of apps, although Android does too. If the iPhone app availability was similar to Mac Software availability, the iPhone would not be popular. The arrogance though. One button? Really? A few more buttons would make things nicer. Love my iPhone, but haven't used an Andriod yet. Have the feeling Apple will lose this one in time. Android runs on a lot of devices and is more open to customizing without risking your warranty.
Apple has made strides in user interfaces. I seem to remember it was them that popularized the use of a mouse, graphic interfaces, and proportional typefaces long before Windows came along. The first version of Windows I think was text-based. And Windows has followed and imitated Apple since. Windows 7 seems very similar to Mac OS. And not that that is necessarily a good thing...
I was recently in an Apple store for an iPhone repair. I think it was the best customer service experience I've ever had. You can afford to do that when you've marked everything up so high.
Innovative? New? The latest Mac OS's are all Unix underneath which dates back way before the IBM PC, before Apple, back to 1969. But then again, you can see the Unix-like similarities in IBM/Microsoft's initial DOS versions too. In fact, Microsoft's version of DOS seemed kind of like what the JWs do. You can see a correlation, but everything has to be slightly different. It's not a church, it's a Kingdom Hall, but same thing. It's not ls, it's dir, but same thing. It's not, ed, it's edit. mv is rename, and so on.
That said, I have two Apple computers (one intel-based), two Windows boxes, and a Linux machine running a Red Hat clone. So I'm not entirely closed off to one side or the other.
If Apple became like everybody else, they'd lose their niche. Which is probably based on a desire by their fan-base to be different. Whether that difference serves them better or not.
