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A comment on 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1. Parent comment

Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by Scuds on Friday June 20, 2014 @06:30PM (#7923266)
why the Apple II was still kept around for that long is kind of a mystery to me. It's not games. Maybe educational customers? Maybe next to no migration path for business users? I had an uncle who ran a veterinarian clinic off of Appleworks and several floppies worth of data for god knows how long. "Works for me" is a powerful force, and they'd probably squeezed all the costs out of the Apple II line.
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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by StillBored on Sunday June 22, 2014 @12:44AM (#7926922)
"Apple II was still kept around for that long is kind of a mystery to me."

There was a very strong following, especially in the educational market. I remember seeing schools purchasing labs of IIGS's as late as the early 1990's.

Basically, the apple ][ was the cash cow that kept Apple afloat for years while they tried to sell 68k macs. Apple basically tried to kill the II for a decade but wasn't successful enough to just cut off the customer base that was crying for new models.

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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by diydsp on Saturday June 21, 2014 @09:07AM (#7924872)
There are many reasons, but one of the big subtleties that should get remembered is that the Apple II had essentially two great epics:

Epic 1: The Apple II sold with no expansion cards, but many expansion slots. Hackers and business designed addons for years.

Epic 2: the Apple IIe (and later IIc) were sold with an optimal set of expansion cards.

So you had one generation of experimentation and a second generation that leveraged all the hard work!

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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by StillBored on Sunday June 22, 2014 @12:39AM (#7926913)
"Hackers and business designed addons for years."

Hackers and "business" continue to design and sell cards for them!

(CompactFlash & USB-storage interface card) http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforA...

(ethernet boards) http://a2retrosystems.com/

(RAM boards) http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?p=321

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