Computing history (was Synthfool)

[David Halliday]

> Woz wrote Integer BASIC and Apple DOS, as well as all the firmware.
> AppleSoft was a version of Microsoft BASIC written by MS for Apple. The
> biggest change was the addtion of Woz's hires graphics routines.

And for code hackers, check out Woz's IWM - Incredible Woz Machine for the
Apple ][ - official name Sweet16 an incredible piece of code - he
essentially created a virtual 16-bit CPU with floating point math that could
run on the 6502 with very little overhead and you could switch in and out of
it when needed, pass stuff back and forth to it...  Amazing stuff.  Terse.
Fast.

If you can find magazine called Embedded Systems Programming for around the
turn of this year, Jack Crenshaw did a wonderful analysis of this.



> >Actually the mouse was invented at SRI (Stanford Research Institute).
PARC
> >researchers made good use of it.  As for Xerox, I used to work there.
They
> >did produce and sell computer systems with their GUI (before my stint
> >there).  It was actually a much more flexible system than even the Mac.
> >Xerox management didn't know what to do with those pesky computer things
and
> >got out of the business.  Besides, where does the paper and toner go?
Yes,
> >another short-sighted "vision" that changed the world...

And Canon came out with a system called the Kat around that time.  Couple of
inovations, it was based on the 8088 so it could kinda run some PC
compatible stuff but it was GUI.  The power switch triggered an interrupt
which dumped the memory to the disk and then turned the machine off.  Turn
it back on and you are right back where you were.  The screen was black on
white, portrait formfactor - you could display a full 8.5x11 page on it.
Built in phone on top with dialer and modem.  Sold for too much and was
marketed pretty much exclusivly to businesses.


> 32 bit processors just gobble up RAM and disk space. They had ot bend over
> backward to make that machine work. And even then there were few
> applications until it got up to 1MB. Today, were's stuck with a memory
> management system that can directly address 4GB of RAM but can get so
> screwed up that it thinks it's out of memory. And talk about file
> bloating...I was dealing with it long before '95.

My read on this is that they decided to go with the absolute fastest CPU
they could find and make it do EVERYTHING.  They were trying to make the
thing as cheap to manufacture as possible so they didn't use fancy keyboard
controllers, disk controllers, video controllers, etc...  They used the bare
minimum of glue logic and had the poor 68000 run the entire show.  Elegant
design and low body count but you can paint yourself into a corner and make
it really hard to upgrade.