8-bit guy does retrobrighting and sd2scsi on a SE..

[John_A]

Kind of like this youtube channel.. he has videos on a little bit of everything that is vintage computer related.

https://youtu.be/wXWlJFrX19s

 

[Carboy7]

Already watched that video...

 

[Boctor]

I saw that, as well. I enjoyed it, since I will eventually need to install a SCSI2SD. I also don't often see people building their own mounting brackets, which is pretty neat. If I remember, 8-Bit Guy may have made some interesting points about whether or not the IIgs was superior to the Macintosh 128k.

 

[mac-man6]

You guys beat me to it. Comparing this to his Commodore 128 restoration, I thought the prices he paid for the machines was a bit odd. I thought he got the MacSE for a good price and he paid too much for a DIRTY broken commodore.

I do appreciate the attention to detail and the care he shows to the machines.

 

[Carboy7]

 8-Bit Guy may have made some interesting points about whether or not the IIgs was superior to the Macintosh 128k.

Yep, he did. The video is here.

 

[EvieSigma]

It's a shame he never made more episodes, he has at least 3 episodes with just the LC/Classic, Performa 5200/5300/6200/6300, and Power Mac 4400! 

 

[mac-man6]

It's a shame he never made more episodes, he has at least 3 episodes with just the LC/Classic, Performa 5200/5300/6200/6300, and Power Mac 4400! 

I tried searching for the 4400 episode but couldn't find it. On a sidetone he does a fun video on his two EV cars

 

[EvieSigma]

Oh no, he didn't make those episodes, those are just three episodes he could easily make.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Don't you guys think the ROMs on his SE look a bit weird?

I'm sure we all would like to help him, wouldn't we?

You can never let a fellow soldier down! Remember that!

He sure should give Lido a go, Apple SC setup ain't the best thing out there...

 

[SlateBlue]

I did reach out to him to suggest using Lido to initialize the SCSI2SD. Hopefully, he'll post an update of his progress.

 

[Gorgonops]

8-Bit Guy may have made some interesting points about whether or not the IIgs was superior to the Macintosh 128k.

Wow, it's impressive how much wrong there is with his video comparing the IIgs to the Mac Plus, and this is coming from someone who thinks that there was a lot about the original Macintosh that was pretty wrong-headed. TL;DR version of my thoughts:

I would agree that the IIgs was in some areas intentionally technically crippled (and later ignored) in order to provide additional pressure for customers to go with the Macintosh instead, but I don't buy his premise that it would have been better for Apple to pursue an upgraded Apple II-family system *instead* of the Macintosh once the Macintosh had actually been birthed, certainly not as late as 1986. Strategic arguments aside (The 65816 may be more cycle-efficient than the 68000 and offers direct binary backwards compatibility with the 6502, but it's also saddled with an 8-bit data bus and 16-bit programming model and had no realistic future roadmap. It was a backwards looking design at a time where the industry as a whole was preparing for the 32 bit revolution) his $2599 vs. $999 price comparison is grossly specious; as he himself notes it was really $2500 vs $1500 with a monitor for the IIgs, but what he glosses over is the GS would also have needed at least one $399 3.5" floppy disk drive (and realistically another $299 5.25" one to run most available II software at launch), *plus* a RAM card ($129 for 256k expandable to 1MB) and a SCSI card to really equal the base config of a Mac Plus, so we're *really* looking at $2599 vs... $2454? And, of course, the 16-bit GS/OS wasn't actually available until *1988*, so in 1986 was little more than an Apple IIe with a few handy upgrades built in; if what you wanted was a GUI-based computer the wasn't even *remotely* on level ground with the Mac, which was considered the "gold standard", either at launch or for a *long* time afterwards, and it was also substantially more expensive than and arguably technically inferior to both the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. (And of course the Mac had its 1:1 aspect ratio screen resolution; I'm sorry, 200 line modes for GUIs suck and spot color is inadequate compensation for the loss of proper square pixels.)

Steve Jobs arguably made plenty of mistakes with the Mac, but Apple didn't make one betting on his baby over the Apple II to carry them into the 1990's.

 

[Unknown_K]

You guys beat me to it. Comparing this to his Commodore 128 restoration, I thought the prices he paid for the machines was a bit odd. I thought he got the MacSE for a good price and he paid too much for a DIRTY broken commodore.

I do appreciate the attention to detail and the care he shows to the machines.

I think he paid $30 for the C128 and 1571 drive with power supplies, that doesn't sound that bad untested (which is what most people sell those as).

 

[kreats]

I think he's wrong. The IIGS isn't a better machine.

The original 128k should have been 512k, and the mac 512k could even be used by people today for productivity (e.g. write a letter or a book). Not so the IIGS.

e.g. Microsoft word 5.1 is pretty close to modern versions.

Game music also isn't a big deal.. he shows lemmings but that sounds fine on mac.

Booting up and using GSOS is a massive chore compared to MacOS if you've ever tried it - even with SCSI and ram expansions.

At the time - the massive library of Apple II software would have made the IIGS a reasonable choice though.

 

[Boctor]

Third-party support would have arrived faster, had the Macintosh supported its own development environment of some kind. For the first few years, it was completely Lisa-reliant, if I remember.

 

[Gorgonops]

At the time - the massive library of Apple II software would have made the IIGS a reasonable choice though.

Given the competition Apple had at the time one thought does come up: what if instead of introducing the IIgs they'd instead produced a 68000 Macintosh with rudimentary color support (I'm sort of thinking something along the lines of the "MCGA" video IBM put in the low-end PS/2 Model 25 and 30s: 64k of VRAM providing a 640x480 monochrome high-res mode for desktop software and a 320x200 mode specifically targeted at educational games) and the MEGA II Apple-IIe-on-a-chip used in the IIgs and later LC Apple II cards built in. Make it in both color and monochrome-screened versions, and sell the monochrome version at the same price point they chose for the Mac Plus. (Or, even, put the IIe-compatibility circuitry on a card and price the system $300 or $400 lower without it installed.)

Apple's $2,600 pricing for the Mac Plus was, frankly, highway robbery. When IBM, another "premium" vendor, introduced the PS/2 line just a few months later they listed the 8mhz Model 30 at $2,295 with a hard disk (monitors were $250 or $595, mono or color, respectively, which still means that a complete mono system with an HD was less than *just* a Mac Plus without mass storage). For that matter, the IIgs also looks like its gouging pretty hard, given a complete system *without* a hard disk is, again, more expensive than a PS/2 and the color monitor's resolution is hideous by comparison to VGA. (The IIgs also invites extremely unkind value comparisons to the Amiga and Atari ST, of course.) There's zero reason to believe that Apple couldn't have continued to make a *very generous* profit margin on this hypothetical Mac Plus/Apple II hybrid, and think of the other benefits:

1: It would have given the Apple II user base a *direct* migration path to the Macintosh instead of walling them off in a parallel ghetto. If the system offered mechanisms for exchanging data with Apple II disks or, even, a method for getting Prodos access to an Appletalk network through the Macintosh side, the presence of such a machine might have in fact accelerated efforts to gracefully sunset the Apple II.

2: All the time and effort wasted on developing GS/OS would have been saved.

3: An optional low-res color mode accessible to the 68000 side might have been very attractive for educational and game software developers. (IE, it would have given them essentially what they got with the IIgs, but with a faster and more familiar CPU driving it.)

4: The value-add of being able to run the vast library of Apple II software could have still been a significant selling point, even if in the end customers ended up mostly using the new systems exclusively as Macintoshes. This might have done a lot to blunt the argument that the Mac was "too expensive" at the entry-level.

The downside might have been that the presence of rudimentary color support in the low-end system might have slightly impacted the value proposition of the Macintosh II, but I don't really see it being that much of a problem. Anyone wanting color for more than games would want it at higher resolutions than the low-end Apple II compatible system would offer anyway.

Of course, this presumes some strange alternate universe in which decisions made by computer companies in the 1980's actually made some sort of sense.

 

[EvieSigma]

Frankly, sometimes it seems like a miracle the personal computer industry made it through the 80s.

 

[Unknown_K]

If you know anything about the PC business, its that the industry has had several mass extinctions along the way (hardware and software), and we are left with whatever the winners offer. Most of the 80's manufacturers do not exist anymore.

 

[Gorgonops]

And, sadly enough, if you look back at the "winners'" decisions in detail and compare them to the "losers'"it often gets really difficult to argue that the winners by any means deserved to win. Hindsight is of course 20-20, but it's amazing how many company strategies back then basically boiled down to throwing random stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. (And in many cases the larger companies would actually have multiple teams throwing mutually contradictory stuff at the wall, each other, etc, which totally describes Apple in the 1980's. Maybe they weren't quite as bad as Commodore... maybe? I dunno, between the Apple III and the epic fail that was their disk storage division it's sort of hard to tell.)

Not that we're necessarily much more sane today.

 

[Unknown_K]

Look at what sold in the 80's PCs:

Commodore Vic20, C64, C128, Amiga 1000

Atari had the 800 line and ST

Tandy had the Color computers and later the 1000 PC line

IBM came out with the PC and 100's of clones followed

Apple had the Apple II, III and finally the Mac.

Small blips were companies like Texas Instruments, Timex (Sinclair), MSX companies like Sony , Apple clones, Acorn, Amstrad, Coleco, Sharp, NEXT, etc.

Big players like SGI and SUN that crashed and burned.

All kinds of custom systems with custom CPU's and OS or basic ROM 100% incompatible with each other is peripherals and software.

Today we have x86/X64 with a few choices of OS and ARM/PPC for phones, cheap tablets, and consoles.