fujidude

I used to have real Atari gear plus an APE cable and the APE software. Had water damage at the house and it's all gone now. Anyway I am just curious though, APE software needs APE cable, but will AspeQt run with the APE cable as well as the SIO2PC cable? Those newer APE cables (USB style now) Steve has on his sight look really nice.

Deleted, thread too old for my comments to be of proper value. Sorry, Im new around here. Pleased to "meet" you all by the way.

You are hitting on what I always remembered as the reason that PC clones survived and all else fell by the way side sooner or later. The biggest reason everyone but the clone makers eventually folded, was precisely because they were not making low cost high, value clones, and instead were making high(er) priced, low(er) value, closed and proprietary systems. The natural inertia of market is to move towards the better value, or at least what is perceived better value. Things that improve perception of value are good capabilities and low cost. Cost is pretty straight forward, but let's talk about capabilities for a second. In my view, in the context of this discussion, capability comes down to two things: hardware and software. If the hardware is crap, the software can only go so far. But just because hardware might be fantastic, it means NOTHING without software to take advantage. This brings me to the second biggest reason why only the clones really thrived ultimately: software. In retail it's "location, location, location." In computing it's software, software, software. The PC clones were born into an existence of an enormous software library. And importantly, there was a lot of quality productivity software inside that library. So there we have it: computers available to buy that are lower cost due to off the shelf parts, AND plenty of good software which increased the capability. While it's true the hardware capabilities of the clones early on was less than that of contenders like the Amiga, the software library more than made up for that and allowed them to surpass the rest. This is the beginnings of the huge popularity of the PC clones. That inertia mentioned before now gets a force applied to it, making for it to become more popular. What we get is increasing momentum. Yes, momentum and the increasing of it. This is the third big reason. The increase in popularity for the reasons already laid out, is then benefitted by yet another principle. That is popularity begets poularity. Not only that but popularity begets a larger customer base to peddle new hardware and software upgrades to. That in turn leads to more and better hardware and more and better software. Do you see the "capability" angle getting some serious boost here? I do. And if that isn't bonus enough, more sales of hardware leads to the ability to have ever larger production runs on parts. Guess what that does..... lowers their unit cost. So what you end up with is a platform that has an ever increasing capability, with an ever decrasing cost. Companies who wish to keep all the profit potential for themselves and staying closed are eventually simply unable to compete. Look at Apple. It has adopted clone hardware now. If their OS wasn't so derivitive of BSD and Unix, I doubt the hardware aspect alone would allow them to survive this long. Look at IBM themselves. It's been several years since they have sold a PC that so many others imitated, because they tried to get their hardware closed again with MCA etc. Well, those are the reasons I submit. I'm sure some may agree and some not, but I'm pretty well convinced of the reality of it. I do enjoy the discussion and am always hopeful to learn different perspectives though.

That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that iNTEL's x86 architecture, well its evolutionary decendents anyway, are really RISC architecture at heart. That architecture has oodles of instructions, op-codes, and complex operations supported right in the chips. They're most definitely CISC based my friend, and everyone else I've ever heard or read so far sees it that way too. Now if we are all somehow mistaken, I really would like to learn the truth. But you just saying so isn't going to be enough. Sorry.