I was never an Apple fanboy as a kid, and as an adult I've developed a strong aversion to anything Apple related. This is due to my ideological bent towards open source, open systems, open standards, open hardware, etc. - which is basically anathema to Apple.
And yet...
The Apple IIGS was one of the things I lusted after when I was a kid. I remember reading about it in the magazines and just being enamored with this thing. I wanted one so bad. Sadly my family couldn't afford the price tag and I never got one. But even now, I occasionally consider jumping on Ebay and trying to find one for sale and buying it. It's the one Apple product I can still see buying even now.
The Macintosh suffered several near death experiences including:
* the 1984 model having too little RAM to be anything more than a cool demo
* Motorola giving up on the 68k platform forcing Apple to switch to Power PC
* difficulty switching from classic MacOS to something modern, with the belated switch to Mac OS X.
* Power PC being a power pig, being forced to switch to Intel architecture
Any of these could have been the end of the platform but Apple always powered through.
I imagine an alternate timeline where instead of releasing the Mac, Apple released the IIGS a few years prior to when it did and managed to evolve the Apple II line into something that would still exist today.
I imagine an alternate timeline where instead of releasing the Mac, Apple released the IIGS a few years prior to when it did and managed to evolve the Apple II line into something that would still exist today.
I've pondered the same thing a few times. I do wonder where that would have led.
Most of the 8-bit computers got GUI interfaces such as GEOS for the C-64 and Deskmate 3 for the Color Computer 3. Most of the 8-bit computers also got late life upgrades such as the C-128, Coco3, etc.
The IIGS was a bigger upgrade than most of those because it went to a real 24-bit address space and a much faster CPU than the original, compared to most of the others which were mostly about upgrading the video system to support 80 column text mode.
The story that hasn't really been told about the 1980s was the failure of the 68k series which led to the demise of a number of computers that tried to outperform the early 8-bit machines but struggled such the Atari ST, Amiga, etc. From home computer vendors to UNIX workstation vendors they all either jumped ship to another CPU or went out of business.
Obviously Motorola decided to kill it and replace it with the Power PC, but I've never seen a clear explanation of why -- Intel grew it's way out of the 8-bit doldrums because it did the same trick IBM did with the 360... Keep upgrading it's CPU while keeping backwards compatibility. There was that strange period from 1978 to 1996 or so where home computers seemed frozen in midair, not making much progress, precisely because there was no forward path to upgrade your CPU. Jumping architectures is a risky move, and in the case of Motorola consigned it to a bit part in the CPU industry.
Had the IIGS continued to evolve the obvious thing is that it would have had to make a transition to a real 32-bit architecture.
And yet...
The Apple IIGS was one of the things I lusted after when I was a kid. I remember reading about it in the magazines and just being enamored with this thing. I wanted one so bad. Sadly my family couldn't afford the price tag and I never got one. But even now, I occasionally consider jumping on Ebay and trying to find one for sale and buying it. It's the one Apple product I can still see buying even now.