Nice finds in the archives, as ever, Paul!
Quoted for exposure:
Quoted for exposure:
The highlight of the keynote, however, was a shouting match between Gassée and Bill Mensch, designer of the GS' 65816 microprocessor. Mensch took exception to a comment Gassée made about a lack of available chips for a faster GS. Mensch reached the floor microphone and said he had chips Apple could use. Gassée responded quickly and emotionally that he was surprised to hear Mensch make that claim, considering the number of problems Apple had had dealing with Mensch and Western Design. Mensch tried to keep the argument going, but the ever-alert auditorium sound crew turned off the mike.
Not to be denied an audience with Gassée, Mensch tracked him down off stage, and the two nearly came to blows. I'm sure many jokes about the incident are circulating, but the best line I've heard came from my wife, who said, "You mean you went to a fight and a keynote address broke out?" Yes, and let's hope Gassée continues to think the II is worth fighting for.
I think I vaguely understood that Apple didn't want the IIɢs to be fast enough to knock any shine off the Mac, but that could be wrong. Wikipedia cites this article:Apparently. Gassée was trying to wrap up his speech when he said something about how Apple was unable to speed up the IIGS hardware because it couldn't find enough high-speed 65816 chips.
At this point. Bill Mensch pounced on one of the open microphones, held up some little packages and said something to the effect Thai, "I'm the designer of the 65816 and I have here three 12 MHz 65816s, If you order them we can ship." Mensch claimed that he had been trying to tell Apple, without success, that the high-speed chips were available. Meanwhile, Gassée said he hadn't heard from Mensch since die IIGS was first introduced.
Chips being as they arc, the existence of three ultrafast renditions in Bill Mensch 's
pocket doesn't necessarily mean that his company, Western Design Center, can manufacture the silicon in sufficient quantity to meet Apple's needs. Even if it could, Apple may have other reasons for not using the faster chip, including reliability issues and price.
(machine translation)As for processor speed, the choice of a maximum speed of 2.8 MHz which was made at the time of design corresponded as much to a commercial choice as to a technical choice. From a technical point of view, the processor could easily go up to 16 MHz but the supplier, due to lack of suitable testing means, only certifying it up to 4 MHz, forced Apple to take a lower base frequency for the processor. to this certification. On the commercial side, the real problem was that at Apple, the new Apple IIGS risked competing, with a higher processor speed, with the Macintosh which, at the time, did not yet have a color screen and whose graphics resolution and especially the sound was far from equaling that of the Apple IIGS. This maximum speed of 2.8 MHz remained, throughout the commercial life of the Apple IIGS, a real shortcoming for the machine; which largely explains the success of accelerator cards which were offered by suppliers other than Apple (ZipGS and Transwarp GS for example).
Statistics: Posted by BigEd — Sun Feb 25, 2024 8:44 am