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The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
Woz, Hillman, Rickard, Harvey Leitman, and Lee Collings spent the rest of 1984 hammering out the specifications and solving hard problems like how to speed up memory access without breaking existing software. But a common thread through many of the reports I’ve read about the early days of the ‘816 is that WDC and its fabrication partners struggled to deliver 4MHz and faster chips on time, in volume, and at spec. If you’re the number cruncher who had to choose between spinning up a run of 50,000 Mark Twains that cost a lot more to build than 50,000 IIe cards for Mac LCs that are already in production, already in a warehouse, or already sold to customers, which would you pick?
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