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During the design stage, Steve Jobs argued that the Apple II should have two expansion slots

"Sorry, can't use a modem right now, I have both a floppy drive and a printer plugged in."

It would have been worse than that. I had a II+, and my memory is that the ability to use 80-column text on screen required a video card that took one of the slots (the main difference between the II and the II+ was that this card was included in the package). If you only had two slots, you'd be done as soon as you plugged in the drive.

Maybe Jobs was hoping to sell us an Apple III with 3 expansion slots the following year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#Expansion

Given that this was the result when Jobs didn't have Woz vetoing him, i doubt it.

The guy was obsessed with looks and "experience". To him, a computer was to be a magical black box that people powered on and powered off. To open up the case and poke around inside was "dirty".

I think they were more aiming at gradually removing expansion slots but selling serial-port-to-expansion-port dongles...

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