JosephG's Profile

  • Mar 22, 2006
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Latest comments made by: JosephG

  • It might be relevant to also comment on Apple’s markup which now seems high because we are now used to mother boards coming out of Taiwan at super-market style paper-thin markups of about 2% to 4%. At that time IBM was reputedly charging 20 to 25 times (2000% to 2500%) the hardware price for their mainframes. DEC was gaining market share by “only” charging about 15 times hardware prices. Hence, Apple’s 4 times or 5 times hardware price seemed like a relatively good bargain at that time. I agree Apple would have sold more at a markup of 400% rather than 500% - but at least Apple did look after students. Due to Apple’s discounting (yes, they did do that once upon a time) I purchased my Apple ][ retail (all taxes paid) for less than the local dealers could get their Apple ][s wholesale. I was really pleased – but the local dealers weren’t (some changed to sell IBM PC compatibles when these came out). :-( One other item may be of interest. My memory was that “LISA” was officially an acronym for “Locally Integrated Software Architecture” – it was just pure co-incidence that it was also the name of Steve Job’s only daughter! :-)
    AustraliaJosephG had this to say on Mar 24, 2006 Posts: 2
    Five Biggest Apple Mistakes
  • According to a friend who worked for both Apple & IBM at that time, the Apple software development team were a group of mainly 20's developers. Imposing their views led to problems for older people. I ran into this at courses I then taught which included older typists who claimed: 1) The letters on the screen were too small for 50 yo typists (they said while Microsoft's were fuzzier, they were bigger & easier to read). 2) The mouse was fine for three-handed typists (the early Macs had no KB: equivalents for menu items - not good for typists who were used to pounding away on their KB: all day; Microsoft had KB: equivalents at that time). 3) The menu items required holding the mouse button down while moving down to select a menu item. Many of the typists had developed something akin to arthritis in their fingers, and literally could not reliably use Mac. menus! Those in my classes had uniformly demanded their empolyers get PCs, (Microsoft had presumably researched this & only required a click on the menu heading and the menu item). Apple later fixed this by changing to a similar system to Microsoft's, but by that stage much of the damage had been done. 4) I thoroughly agree about HyperCard. A brilliant system at the time. However it seemed Apple was mainly interested in selling boxes, and didn't know what to do with this marvellous software. It didn't promote it. It split it off into a separate company, and then bought it back. What a waste! :-( 5) I found the Lisa was for my purposes the most reliable and useful computer I used (mainly for development), until Windows NT came along. In my opinion it was well before its time. What a shame Apple did not sell it at a reasonable price & develop it - this was a computer that was well ahead of anything else at the time. Seems to me that Apple squandered a marvellous lead over its rivals. :-( 6) Making the Macs. closed systems meant that most of the experimental interfacing that used Apple ][s was transferred to the PCs which conntinued the Apple ][ tradition of easily-accessed expansion slots. More lost market. So many lost opportunities... :-(
    AustraliaJosephG had this to say on Mar 22, 2006 Posts: 2
    Five Biggest Apple Mistakes