The Apple II Turns 35 Today 173
harrymcc writes "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Informative)
Apple II was released in 1977.
Macintosh in 1984.
IBM PS/2 in 1987.
Remove you presence from our lawn, n00b.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!
Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
Woz Floppy Drive (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but there was something more: The Floppy drive, namely, Woz floppy drive... Did you ever use floppies with the other machines? Then you know what i mean, several minutes vs few seconds to boot the very same program, and hell nothing would crash if you accidentaly pushed a button when the drive was reading, unlike certain other brand...
Marketing pushed Macs later.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
>>>they were using Video Toasters for those special effects
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution. It took the computer days-and-days of rendering to produce just a few minutes of CGI. (If you still have doubt, just watch the Star Wars Walker demo... all of which was produced without the video toaster.)
BTW thanks for fixing the name of the software (Lightwave). Over 20 years one forgets names. Even now I don't remember the software I used to get online, even though I used it daily. JXterm or something like that.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:3, Informative)
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution.
None of those graphics were generated by an Amiga "GPU", because the Amiga didn't actually have one.
It had a blitter, which is a fancy DMA memory copy engine, and it had "copper programs", which were an old and primitive tech (as in, not Turing complete) descended from Jay Miner's previous personal computer design (the Atari 8-bit). Neither is a recognizable relative of a modern GPU.
Programs like Lightwave 3D did everything with software rendering engines. The only function of the Amiga's graphics hardware was to be a dumb framebuffer.
(Also, as far as the Toaster was concerned, the main unique feature of Amiga video HW it took advantage of was that the Amiga had relatively high quality NTSC signal generation, and facilities for interfacing external HW (the VT) into the analog signal path. The digital side or "GPU" as you're calling it was basically irrelevant to anything in the VT or LW3D.)
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
> true multitasking (preemptive)
Well... yes, and no.
The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.
Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".
In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.
Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.