Comment by dhosek
5 days ago
The great thing about the whole Apple ][ system was that it was sophisticated enough to actually do stuff but simple enough that a single person could understand it (largely because it was mostly the work of a single person). To this day, my mental model of how a computer works is the Apple ][.
Indeed. I have often wondered why university courses tend to use their own made-up machines to teach this stuff, as opposed to using the Apple II (or some of its near-contemporaries).
I think some of it is just aligning with more modern computing technologies combined with the people who write the materials have lived rapid evolution of computing technology and decided it was best to use a generic abstraction that better reflects contemporary technology. I’d note that Knuth, in The Art of Computer Programming moved his abstract machine from MIX to MMIX, the latter being a RISC instruction set, the former being more aligned with 60s style machine instructions.