Back in 1982, I began to become interested in the growing phenomena of the Personal Computer. Unfortunately, I had two kids in high school getting ready for college and couldn't afford to invest that much money in a new hobby. Finally, in 1983, Commodore gave us the C64, much cheaper than an Apple II and could do so much more. I finally justified the purchase on the grounds that it would be very educational. It certainly paid off in that respect since my youngest daughter wound up with a degree in computer science and currently has a very good job paying much more that I was making when I retired after 32 years as an Aerospace Engineer.
At the same time, a young engineer in my office became enamored with the then new Macintosh. He shelled out $2500 for a 128K Mac that would do little more than my Commodore 64. There was no good software and it didn't have enough memory to do anything useful. He wound up spending almost $2000 in upgrades and wound up with a 512k Mac just as Apple stopped supporting that version. Further more, there was no upgrade path. In the early 80's, I was experimenting with various airfoils on a standard model. Hand plotting airfoils wasn't too hard with older airfoils with coordinates at regular intervals but the new Eppler airfoils had coordinates at irregular intervals that didn't fit the grid on my graph paper. I wrote a simple curve fit in Basic and used the C64 to calculate the coordinates at intervals to fit the graph paper. This soon evolved into an airfoil plotting program as I leaned more about dot matrix printers. I soon ported the plotting program to most other computers running the 6502 chip including the Atari, TI, and Radio Shack Color Computer but not the Apple II. Apple, in it's infinite wisdom, decided that there was no reason to send ASCII code directly to a printer and crippled the operating system so that only a machine language routine could be used for plotting. I did manage to port the program to my friends Macintosh using Microsoft Quickbasic for the MAC, but the most successful port was to various PC's running MS DOS. By 1988, I was selling enough PC programs to justify the purchase one of the very first Gateway 2000 computers. About the same time, my friend gave up on the MAC and also bought a Gateway. I continued selling the MAC airfoil plotting program for a couple of years until changes in the MAC operating system made it impossible to run programs written in QuickBasic. About this time my friend and I came to the same conclusion. We would never again be shafted by Apple. Chuck Anderson RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
