You mean when computer magazines contained program code instead of being filled with press releases and advertisements? I miss those days as well.

I'm in my mid 40's currently. The era of these PCs were a big deal at the time, and it's culture felt as if we understood something so far beyond which most people understood. It really felt like they could\would change the world - which they have, but more in a Star Trek Generations kind of way.... which I am still waiting to happen :)

ezra4no1 You are so right about that. Reading an obituary column about Radio Shack a few months ago, the writer spoke about that very culture. Teenagers who were new to computers and older guys who were mainframe veterans would get together to share knowledge. The age difference meant nothing, just a love of this new technology. DOS could be maddening at times but for a tinkerer DOS was also a lot of fun.

ezra4no1 I miss it too, it was a great time.

davidca96 I will say I do not miss loading programs via cassette tape. My TRS-80 pocket computer never seemed to be able to get that right.

I remember the product, but then I remember C/PM and the Timex Sinclair.

How did that go?

@@gregorymalchuk272I’m not OC, but I can almost assure you that didn’t end well.

I think that idea was pretty unrealistic. It's a mindset that was great for the late 1970s, when hobbyists could barely afford a computer: You could buy a minimalist system to start out, and then upgrade later. But so much of the Apple II platform was built on what the Apple II had been in the past that it was very difficult to make it grow into something new. So on the IIgs for instance, you needed a 3.5" drive for new software and a 5.25" drive for old software... And you needed the old software because the new system's software library never even got close to the vast library the old Apple II had accumulated over the 8 years prior. Compatibility with old game software in particular required slowing down the CPU to a 1MHz mode, because virtually anything you would want to do that required timing (animation, sound, etc.) was fully dependent upon the CPU speed. The Apple II was still a major force even in the late 1980s, but computer hobbyists had mostly outgrown it. I think Jobs had the right idea, Apple II was an old platform with a lot of legacy baggage, and the best way forward was to leave it behind.

Nah, the IIgs was inadequate in other ways, too. There was a quote by Woz where he said that a 65816 (the CPU of the IIgs) running at 8MHz could have run circles around a 68000 (the CPU of the early Macintoshes and various other early 16-bit home computers). And, that's a complicated thing to determine 'cause there are a lot of variables at play (dealing with memory segmentation and smaller number of registers, holding less data per register on the 816... versus the 68000 which took more clock cycles per instruction generally) but I think he was probably right. The 816 may very well have been faster than the 68000 at the same clock speed. However, the IIgs was basically Apple's answer to the Amiga and Atari ST, and the thing about those systems is, their CPUs aren't great, but a lot of their capabilities are the product of other chips in the system. These other devices in the chipset allow the system to do things like copy areas of RAM around, create multi-layer scrolling backgrounds and character sprites, etc. all without burdening the CPU. Even if the IIgs had an 8MHz CPU it wouldn't have those capabilities. On the IIgs, every little change to the display would have to be done by the CPU. You want a scrolling background? The CPU needs to read 32kB of data from somewhere in RAM and write that data to the framebuffer, possibly with some manipulation in between, every single frame. Want some character sprites? Add another few hundred bytes for each. That doesn't sound like much, but even for an 8MHz CPU that's actually a pretty significant burden. (About 3 cycles to load 16 bits, and 3 to store them in the framebuffer - but if you're scrolling it by a number of pixels that's not a multiple of 4, you need to spend another 16 cycles or so per word shifting bits and combining with previous words of data - so in the general case somewhere around 22 cycles for every 16 bits worth of scrolling background - meaning an 8MHz 65816 would only be able to update a scrolling background around 20 times per second... If that were the only thing the CPU did!) But then on top of that was another problem: The IIgs is backwards-compatible with the IIe, and the way they did that was to give the system a 1MHz core - 128kB of the system memory is controlled by that core, and locked to that 1MHz speed - that includes all the display RAM and the display controller. So even when a IIgs is running in "fast" mode, writing to display RAM takes as long as it would at 1MHz. (The IIgs does provide a RAM "shadowing" feature that makes this a little less of a problem... But it's still a significant bottleneck.) But then, in the end... At best the IIgs would have probably been another Amiga story. A good platform, one of the best of its time, perhaps, but still kind of a niche product compared to the ever-increasing dominance of the PC on the productivity side, and the game consoles on the gaming side. It probably would have made its mark, had its heyday on the demo scene, and then, like the rest, gotten bowled over in the mid 1990s by the "multimedia PCs" as the platform started to show its age. It's tempting to think, if only this had gone a bit better it would have changed the world, but... If Amiga couldn't do that, I can't imagine the IIgs could.

@@tetsujin_144 I think the IIgs could have given PC's a run for their money. The Apple IIgs cost far less than the MAC, and the IIgs had great sound and a fantastic GUI. It was also expandable like the Apple IIs. If Apple had focused more on an affordable computer that could compete with IBM and the clones, it would have had much more success.

You have 8 cores instead of 8 processors, you only have one processor. In 4MHz mode, the math sprite runs 4 times as fast, not 3.

yeah

The IIgs? The Apple IIgs WAS slow in GS/OS and it was built to be slow on purpose so it didn't compete with the faster Macintosh since Apple was redirecting consumer focus from the II to the Mac. That's why accelerators were released by third-party companies. Typically a computer operating the way it was made to isn't slow unless it was intentionally done or mechanically failing.

That's for computing not teething. I'd see a dentist.

Nah it WAS the time! Paintworks and Deluxe Paint were great among others. Don't forget, even back then the IIgs could do video overlay and color image captures from analog sources like laserdisc players and VCRs. You could record sound and upload/download images, games and files from BBSs and on-line services. We think we've come a very long way all these years later and everything we do now is all new, but the fundamentals are the same. It's just the way we access information, the speed and the quality of it that's changed the most.

Not funny

Vinny Avalanche very funny.

Yeah, in Japan they were introduced in 1984!

Gary Kildall himself was a pioneer of cd rom tech. Legend!

@@EannaButler Sweet

Go shit yo pants

Your an idiot + moron

when did microsoft make pcs? microsoft made operating systems and software. you must be thinking of ibm.

Microsoft was founded in 1985 but did not come out with the first computer which was MS DOS till 1987.

What do you mean by "the first home compatible computer"? You know Apple II was released in 1977 originally?

@@tetsujin_144 Personal computers did not come out until 1984. Businesses and homes did not have computers in the 70s.