On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 12:17:38AM +1130, Mike Andrew wrote: > >then maybe > > there are some users we just don't need to attract. </sunday evening rant> > > too bloody right. I've never been attracted to *nix. I use it because Bill > Gates and Steve Jobs gave me no choice. Linux has some way to go before I > 'like' it. A decent gui is one.
The command line of *nix isn't just any ordinary command line, you can do a lot of tricks with it that no other OS can. If you use it only like an ordinary command line, like DOS or CP/M, then you're missing half it's strength. > greedily, unnecessarily, expensive. It was the Apple ][ that introduced the > bus concept, *the* item from above that made all the difference for the Oem. The S-100 bus existed as a standard bus on many CP/M boxes long before the Apple II, though Apple is to be commended for it's open specs for all of their hardware with the Apple II. (I recall with fondness reading the commented 6502 assembler that Apple provided in it's technical reference manuals.) > Motorola fuelled to the 68040, a far better cpu in all respects than it's > 80486 counterpart (not my say so, industry definition), Apple would not Intel beat the Motorollas only through brute force, eventually simply having more megahertz. Motorolla always had less clock cycles per instruction and a lot more elegance (Though to be fair the original 8080 wasn't intended to be a CPU, and we've been stuck with it's design flaws ever since.) > reduce the price sufficiently to get the cpu chip-volume up, Motorola, > sensibly, gave the public what it deserved. Intel. Well, there were other factors, such as IBM choosing the 8088 for it's PC. ;-) This decision was driven by the fact that the 8080 derived Z-80 at the time had the business market in CP/M boxes. (The 8080 and Z-80 were horrible, a total lack of useful addressing modes, specialized registers that made more sense for embedded controller applications than for a CPU, lots of instruction cycles for many instructions (which Intel didn't fix until the 80286, making efficient assembly programming a difficult art) etc. The 6502 of the Apple, a one-accumulator inexpensive cousin of the Motorolla 6800, was actually a better chip than the 8088 for everything but certain math intensive operations, or later on memory intensive applications once they started shipping lots of RAM with PC clones.) _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
