A Few Good Rumors...
Jerry Whitnell
From Feb 88 issue of Micro-Mini Systems:
Apple Finally Gets its UNIX act together - All on a disk
Apple Computer Inc, Curpertino Calif., chose the Uniforum show in Dallas this
month to introduce A/UX, its version of AT&T Co.'s UNIX System V.2
operating system. A/UX is designed for Apple's high-end Macintosh II and
comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879) or an external ($5,549)
80M-byte rigid-disk drive upgrade packge for current users [Ouch! jdw]. ...
A/UX contains Berkeley UNIX extensions, Network File SYstem, Streams and the
Macintosh Toolbox, plus functions for automatic booting and recovery.
That leaves users with 10 M-bytes of free disk space [Ouch again! jdw].
By preconfiguring the disk, Apple hopes to spare users from hiring UNIX gurus.
From Feb 8, 1988 issue of MacintoshToday
Ashton-Tate reportedly buys Ann Arbor, hot WP program
Ashton-Tate of Torrance Calif. reportedly has acquired Ann Arbor Softworks, INc.
of Newbury Park, Calif. and will soon publish the company's FullWrite
Professional...
Sources said Ashton-Tate bought Ann Arbor and a number of its assets after
months of negotiations between the two firms. Ann Arbor's graphics program
FullPaint is included in the aggreement, but FullCalc, the company's unpublished
spreadsheet, is not.
Ann Arbor's deal with Ashton-Tate could be worth up to $30 million including
royalties, sources said. [Everyone who knows anything :-)] declined to comment.
For those who are interested in C Compilers, see also Dennis Cohen's article
comparing C compilers in MacintoshToday.
Jerry Whitnell Been through Hell?
Communication Solutions, Inc. What did you bring back for me?
- A. Brilliant
Bradford Needham
>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
I'm constantly amazed at Apple's marketing sense of humor.
Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
Brad Needham
br...@tekig4.TEK.COM
David Phillip Oster
>In article <14...@csib.csi.UUCP> jwhi...@csib.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) writes:
>>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
>>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
>Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
I have. a Sun 3/60 is roughly the same price as a Mac II. You get the Unix
for free, but it comes on a tape. So, you need to buy a tape drive. You
can't do anything with it unless you also buy a disk. Conclusion:
$ for Sun 3/60+disk+tape+unix > $ for MacII + disk + unix.
Of course if you are buying two copies of the hardware, the Sun becomes
cheaper because they can each share the tape drive and system software
over their built-in ethernet.
But by the time you've bought decent desktop
publishing, word processing, spreadsheet, and database software the Mac IIs
are cheaper again.
Conclusion: it depends on what you want to do with them which is going to
work out cheaper. The siganture says it all:
--- David Phillip Oster --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: os...@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu
Paul Dietz
>>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
>>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
>
>I'm constantly amazed at Apple's marketing sense of humor.
>Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
I wonder if the powers-that-be realize just how much they have priced
themselves out of the UNIX market? I gather that I wasn't alone in
my vision of buying a MacII so as to ultimately run UNIX. But, I believe
it is now cheaper to SELL my MacII and buy a Sun rather than just
"upgrade". And with things like the NeXT machine coming RSN, Apple
just might be in for a rude awakening.
Apple, you messed up.
Paul H. Dietz ____ ____
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / oo \ <_<\\\
Carnegie Mellon University /| \/ |\ \\ \\
-------------------------------------------- | | ( ) | | | ||\\
"If God had meant for penguins to fly, -->--<-- / / |\\\ /
he would have given them wings." _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-
vik...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
> I have. a Sun 3/60 is roughly the same price as a Mac II. You get the Unix
> for free, but it comes on a tape. So, you need to buy a tape drive. You
> can't do anything with it unless you also buy a disk. Conclusion:
> $ for Sun 3/60+disk+tape+unix > $ for MacII + disk + unix.
With the lack of DMA disk storage and graphics support, can A/UX on a Mac II
operate well when multiple tasks are running and disk swaps are taking place?
Doesn't everything grind to a halt until the disk access is completed, since
the CPU is the disk controller?
These considerations remind me of Oster's signature: the Mac II makes a poor
Sun 3/60 and vice versa...Maybe the thing to do is wait for Apples next 68030
machine before considering Unix. I *really* like my Mac II, however...sigh.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon W. Backstrom "Yah sure...we gonna have fun, you bet!"
Computer Science Department
Indiana University UUCP: {pyramid,ihnp4,pur-ee,rutgers}!iuvax!viking
Lindley Hall 101 ARPA: vik...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Bloomington, IN 47405
"The world has arrived at an age of cheap
(812) 335-2849 (Office) complex devices of great reliability; and
(812) 336-3660 (Home) something is bound to come of it."
- Vannevar Bush (1945)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Phillip Oster
>With the lack of DMA disk storage and graphics support, can A/UX on a Mac II
>operate well when multiple tasks are running and disk swaps are taking place?
>Doesn't everything grind to a halt until the disk access is completed, since
>the CPU is the disk controller?
This is kind of the wrong way to look at things. Consider: a DMA unit is a
second processor that basically has one instruction: BlockMove(). You
would think that the DMA unit could move data around while the CPU is
computing, giving you a theoretical factor of 2 speed up. But it just
isn't so. In order to move data around, you have to move it over the data
bus. The data bus gets just as loaded whether you are using a DMA
controller to move the data or using the main CPU. (Because the 68020 has
an instruction cache, the loop that moves the data stays in the cache, so
all use of the bus is useful data movement.) When the DMA unit is pushing
data around, the 68020 is locked out, unable to get any operands from
memory, unable to get the next instruction to do. (sure, it could finish a
multiply, already in progress, but there aren't many of them in a typical
instruction mix.)
Conclusion: a DMA unit doesn't help much as long as you only have one data
bus in the computer.
There is a big problem though: A/UX and the Mac operating system support a
type of read operation called asynchronous read: the disk gets a command
to transfer data, and the computer goes off and does something else until
the disk generates a hardware interrupt to signify that the data is here.
(Most programs just do a read(), and wait until the data is there, but
under A/UX, there is always something else to run while we are waiting for
the read to complete: the A/UX operating system takes care of it.)
The problem: most mac programs don't use asynch reads. Most Mac disk
benchmarks don't check that the disk driver author actually supports
Asynch reads. Since noone asked for it, most of the existing disk drivers
just make asynchronous reads wait, just the same as if they were ordinary
synchronous reads. (I asked one driver manufacturer why his drives don't
run any faster asynchronously, and he said that noone asked for it and he
had other things to write, so he took the easy way out and just branched
to his synchronous code if the program does try to do asynchronous i/o.)
Under the Macintosh Operating system
The situation is further confused because Apple removed Asynchronous file
Open()s. The Asynchronous bit, in the Open call only, is used to tell a
MFS (64k ROM flat file system) from an HFS (128K and more recent ROM:
hierarchical file system.)
Summary: Don't expect the presence or absence of DMA to be important. What
is important is:
1.) the bus bandwidth (Mac II nuBus, versus Sun VME bus)
2.) whether the disk driver authors correctly support asynchronous reads
and writes.
--- David Phillip Oster --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: os...@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu
Don Ahn
> In article <3600018@iuvax> vik...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu writes:
> >With the lack of DMA disk storage and graphics support, can A/UX on a Mac II
> >operate well when multiple tasks are running and disk swaps are taking place?
> >Doesn't everything grind to a halt until the disk access is completed, since
> >the CPU is the disk controller?
>
> This is kind of the wrong way to look at things. Consider: a DMA unit is a
> second processor that basically has one instruction: BlockMove(). You
> would think that the DMA unit could move data around while the CPU is
> computing, giving you a theoretical factor of 2 speed up. But it just
> isn't so. In order to move data around, you have to move it over the data
> bus. The data bus gets just as loaded whether you are using a DMA
> controller to move the data or using the main CPU. (Because the 68020 has
> an instruction cache, the loop that moves the data stays in the cache, so
> all use of the bus is useful data movement.) When the DMA unit is pushing
> data around, the 68020 is locked out, unable to get any operands from
> memory, unable to get the next instruction to do. (sure, it could finish a
> multiply, already in progress, but there aren't many of them in a typical
> instruction mix.)
>
> Conclusion: a DMA unit doesn't help much as long as you only have one data
> bus in the computer.
I beg to differ with you here. The amount that DMA will help your system
throughput depend on how much of the bus bandwidth you are currently utilizing.
If say, your bus bandwidth is 2megbytes/sec, and your CPU utilization is 1m/s,
and your disk system transfers at 1m/s, a well engineered DMA controller
should be able to "steal cycles" from the CPU and allow it to run close to full
speed while it transfers data. Naturally, there will be some contention
if CPU bandwidth + DMA bandwith > bus bandwith, but you will be getting
almost full utilization of the bus, thus getting improved system performance.
Also, in general, DMA controllers are more efficient at moving data around than
CPU's so even if the DMA "locks out" the CPU from the bus, it is still a win.}i
Supposedly, one of the benefits of using a VAX instead of the 68020 is that
the VAX (at equivalent clock frequencies) utilizes less of the bus than the
68020, thereby giving DMA controllers more usable bandwidth. (I don't remember
the numbers exacty, something like VAX at 30%, and 68020 at 60%). By the
way, the 68030 has a new "burst mode" that uses even more of the bus
bandwidth so DMA for the 68030 will probably be a smaller win than that for the
68020.
> There is a big problem though: A/UX and the Mac operating system support a
> type of read operation called asynchronous read: the disk gets a command
> to transfer data, and the computer goes off and does something else until
> the disk generates a hardware interrupt to signify that the data is here.
> (Most programs just do a read(), and wait until the data is there, but
> under A/UX, there is always something else to run while we are waiting for
> the read to complete: the A/UX operating system takes care of it.)
.....
> Summary: Don't expect the presence or absence of DMA to be important. What
> is important is:
> 1.) the bus bandwidth (Mac II nuBus, versus Sun VME bus)
> 2.) whether the disk driver authors correctly support asynchronous reads
> and writes.
As for asynchronus writes, a DMA controller also helps because it allows you to
tranfer aritrarily sized blocks of data directly into memory. If you
want to transfer a 1 meg file into memory asynchronusly, for example, you can
tell the DMA controller to load it in and you get an interrupt when it's done.
If the CPU is doing transfers, however, you get an interrupt every time
the disk controller's buffer fills up. If the buffer is say, 8K, that's 128
interrupts (i.e. context switches) for that one file. DMA can be a big win
here.
Summary: DMA is a win all around. Big or small depends on your system
configuration
--
Don Ahn
UC/Berkeley Dept. of Zoology
1576 LSB USENET: ...!ucbvax!donahn
(415) 643-6299 ARPA: don...@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
Warren Gish;133 Biochem;x3-9219
Here are a few features of Mac toolbox support under the current version
of A/UX that potential buyers should be interested in knowing:
(1) Mac applications can not print
(2) only a single Mac application can run at a time
(3) no color support for Mac applications under A/UX
(4) file transfers between an A/UX disk partition and
a MacOS partition must be made thru an MFS floppy
disk intermediary
(5) Apple estimates only about 1% or less of the current MacOS
applications will run under A/UX in their present form
(although the changes necessary for A/UX toolbox-compatibility
are said to be quite small)
(6) extra hardware must be purchased in order to use LocalTalk
for printing on a LaserWriter or other communications
Also, the MacII can not be configured to automatically boot A/UX
when powered on -- but maybe there will be a MacOS CDEV+INIT sometime
in the future that will automatically boot A/UX after the MacOS comes up?
The power switch on the MacII will require that the unit be physically
turned back on after an interruption of AC power, unless (I'm guessing)
the power-on switch is taped down.
According to MacWeek, some of the toolbox deficiencies (1-4?) are scheduled
to be fixed this summer. Until then, it appears to me that the current
release of the A/UX toolbox is really to allow developers to prepare for
a summer A/UX marketing fest.
Are there any UN*X gurus out there that can tell us what A/UX,
with its System V Release 2-compatibility, lacks in comparison
to what NeXT is rumored to have in its System V Release 3?
Isn't Release 3 what AT&T is trying to standardize the world upon?
Hey, Apple! Say it ain't so, that all us MacII owners that already
bought 5 MB RAM and an 80 MB disk don't have to buy it all again just
to get A/UX. @#%&!
Warren Gish
IS&T
Evans Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
Charles L Ditzel
> >In article <14...@csib.csi.UUCP> jwhi...@csib.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) writes:
> >>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
> >>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
> >Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
> I have. a Sun 3/60 is roughly the same price as a Mac II. You get the Unix
> for free, but it comes on a tape. So, you need to buy a tape drive. You
> can't do anything with it unless you also buy a disk. Conclusion:
> $ for Sun 3/60+disk+tape+unix > $ for MacII + disk + unix.
$ for Sun 3/60+disk+tape+unix > $ for MacII + disk + unix.
is basically but deceptively a correct statement.
With the Sun you get
+ a 60 Megabyte streaming backup tape drive
+ high resolution (1152x1900 or 1600 x 1280)
+ built-in ethernet
+ DMA
i think if you tacked on the first three on the Mac the statement would
no longer be true (ergo - from a hardware sense the SUN is a much
better buy) ... especially when you start to consider the lack of
DMA on the Mac.
> Of course if you are buying two copies of the hardware, the Sun becomes
> cheaper because they can each share the tape drive and system software
> over their built-in ethernet.
Even more so. agreed.
>
> But by the time you've bought decent desktop
> publishing, word processing, spreadsheet, and database software the Mac IIs
> are cheaper again.
i don't know i can get university ingres, sc (or vc) for free.
Charles L Ditzel
> In article <24...@tekig4.TEK.COM> br...@tekig4.UUCP (Bradford Needham) writes:
> >In article <14...@csib.csi.UUCP> jwhi...@csib.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) writes:
> >>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
> >>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
> >
> >I'm constantly amazed at Apple's marketing sense of humor.
> >Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
>
> I wonder if the powers-that-be realize just how much they have priced
> themselves out of the UNIX market? I gather that I wasn't alone in
> my vision of buying a MacII so as to ultimately run UNIX. But, I believe
> it is now cheaper to SELL my MacII and buy a Sun rather than just
> "upgrade". And with things like the NeXT machine coming RSN, Apple
> just might be in for a rude awakening.
I believe this is just beginning of Apple's attempt into the Unix market
but somehow it is not convincing. I bought a Sun 3/60...
Sun holds the cards these days tho', with apollo in steady decline (19.1
percent of the market - ComputerWorld) and Sun (27.7 %) unleashing
progressively lower ended SPARC - based machines (Sun 4/110). NeXT
probably doesn't stand to much of a chance unless they can demonstrate
1) something quite far beyond all the other unix boxes and
2) an evolutionary path (upgrade to higher architecture -
as the Sun 3/1*0 can upgrade to a Sun 4/1*0)
vik...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Thanks David...I appreicate the time you took to explain things. The
question of how A/UX performs in demanding situations is still open,
however. It is slow? Should I think of A/UX as a great 'single-user'
Unix system that solves connectivity issues?
Hey all you beta-testers...what's your experience with the system? My
own initial reaction to an early beta system was positive, and I was
impressed with all the *real* Berekley enhancements (e.g. job control)
to the software. I was also impressed with the ability to access the
Mac Toolbox from A/UX, but I didn't have any chance to benchmark the
system in terms of how fast it ran with multiple-processes and other
disk intensive operations.
Thanks again! Information anyone?
Jon Backstrom "Yah sure...we gonna have fun, you bet!"
Computer Science Department
Indiana University ARPA: vik...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Bloomington, IN 47405 UUCP: {pyramid,ihnp4,pur-ee,rutgers}!iuvax!viking
Jim Kateley
>
>Here are a few features of Mac toolbox support under the current version
>of A/UX that potential buyers should be interested in knowing:
>
> (1) Mac applications can not print
> (2) only a single Mac application can run at a time
> (3) no color support for Mac applications under A/UX
> (4) file transfers between an A/UX disk partition and
> a MacOS partition must be made thru an MFS floppy
> disk intermediary
Well, not if you have Ethertalk and NCSA telnet. Stuffit 1.31 and
binhex 4.0 run under A/UX, so you can stuff or binhex your files (since
NCSA telnet will only xfer data fork files), then transfer them over with
the FTP stuff in telnet..then unstuff or unbinhex them.... this is
assuming that you have a MacII with A/UX and another Mac that can
talk to it over ethernet.
> (5) Apple estimates only about 1% or less of the current MacOS
> applications will run under A/UX in their present form
> (although the changes necessary for A/UX toolbox-compatibility
> are said to be quite small)
> (6) extra hardware must be purchased in order to use LocalTalk
> for printing on a LaserWriter or other communications
>
>Also, the MacII can not be configured to automatically boot A/UX
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Huh? The SASH application is more than happy to start A/UX up for you
automatically, just make it the startup application, then configure it
to automatically boot...
>when powered on -- but maybe there will be a MacOS CDEV+INIT sometime
>in the future that will automatically boot A/UX after the MacOS comes up?
>The power switch on the MacII will require that the unit be physically
>turned back on after an interruption of AC power, unless (I'm guessing)
>the power-on switch is taped down.
>
>According to MacWeek, some of the toolbox deficiencies (1-4?) are scheduled
>to be fixed this summer. Until then, it appears to me that the current
>release of the A/UX toolbox is really to allow developers to prepare for
>a summer A/UX marketing fest.
>
>Are there any UN*X gurus out there that can tell us what A/UX,
>with its System V Release 2-compatibility, lacks in comparison
>to what NeXT is rumored to have in its System V Release 3?
>Isn't Release 3 what AT&T is trying to standardize the world upon?
>
>Hey, Apple! Say it ain't so, that all us MacII owners that already
>bought 5 MB RAM and an 80 MB disk don't have to buy it all again just
>to get A/UX. @#%&!
>
>Warren Gish
>IS&T
>Evans Hall
>Berkeley, CA 94720
>cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
--
Jim Kateley
Applelink: kateley1
UUCP: {sun, voder, nsc, mtxinu, dual}!apple!kateley
CSNET: kat...@apple.COM
Disclaimer: What I say, think, or smell does not reflect any policy or
stray thought by Apple Computer, Inc.
Tim_M_...@cup.portal.com
cswa...@enzyme.berkeley.edu writes:
>Also, the MacII can not be configured to automatically boot A/UX
>when powered on -- but maybe there will be a MacOS CDEV+INIT sometime
>in the future that will automatically boot A/UX after the MacOS comes up?
>The power switch on the MacII will require that the unit be physically
>turned back on after an interruption of AC power, unless (I'm guessing)
>the power-on switch is taped down.
I don't know about this... Here at U of Notre Dame, we just set the A/UX
drive as the startup device, and now when we start it up we get this great
countdown box A/UX will start in 10...9...8...7... etc. If we cancel it,
we can then escape to the Mac OS. No problem...
+---------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+
| Tim Dierks Tim_M_...@cup.portal.com | C4T...@IRISHMVS.BITNET |
| {backbone}!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!Tim_M_Dierks | die...@ndmath.UUCP |
+---------------------------------------------------+ GEnie: T.DIERKS |
| Amount of pizza consumed each day in the United | 136 Stanford Hall |
| States (in acres): 75 - Harper's Index | Notre Dame, IN 46556 |
+---------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+
Peter Su
One thing to consider in the Mac II vs. Sun question is that
most people buying suns only have to shell out a lot of
bucks for one big machine to be a file server. After that,
diskless nodes are about half the price of a Mac II each.
Pete
--
CSNET: hu...@darmouth.edu UUCP: hu...@eleazar.UUCP (Sorry)
ARPA: hugo%dartmo...@relay.cs.net
QUOTE:"Our president's crazy! Did you hear what he said?" - Talking Heads
Henry Kautz's mailnews program
systems, configured to get real work done. (Eg, a Mac with only 10MB
of user disk space is not considered real!)
Mac II
cpu,4MB,80disk+unix,PMMU 8400
external 80MB disk 3200
ethertalk card 700
4MB memory (8 total) 1200
19" 3rd party mono. monitor 2000
tape backup (40MB) 1500
TOTAL $17,000
Sun
3/50 with 4MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), monochrome monitor
$11,500
3/60 with 8MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), monochrome monitor
$16,400
MIPS: floating DMA Max SIMM slots
point RAM on
chip motherboard
Sun 3/50 1.5 optional ? 4 0
Mac II 2? yes no 8
Sun 3/60 3 yes yes 24 0
Warren Gish;133 Biochem;x3-9219
}In article <69...@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> (Warren Gish) writes:
}} (4) file transfers between an A/UX disk partition and
}} a MacOS partition must be made thru an MFS floppy
}} disk intermediary
}binhex 4.0 run under A/UX, so you can stuff or binhex your files (since
}NCSA telnet will only xfer data fork files), then transfer them over with
}the FTP stuff in telnet..then unstuff or unbinhex them.... this is
}assuming that you have a MacII with A/UX and another Mac that can
}talk to it over ethernet.
with intra-Mac file transfers. BTW: Using MFS floppy intermediaries,
is it straight forward to transfer a file that is larger than
the storage capacity of a single floppy disk?
}}Also, the MacII can not be configured to automatically boot A/UX
}Huh? The SASH application is more than happy to start A/UX up for you
}automatically, just make it the startup application, then configure it
}to automatically boot...
My apologies for the error...I was simply echoing what an Apple sales
rep. told me at a pre-release introduction to A/UX about 3 weeks ago.
In fareness to comp.sys.mac readers and Apple, I should have also pointed
out that I have only ~5 minutes of experience using A/UX.
}Jim Kateley
}Applelink: kateley1
}UUCP: {sun, voder, nsc, mtxinu, dual}!apple!kateley
}CSNET: kat...@apple.COM
}Disclaimer: What I say, think, or smell does not reflect any policy or
} stray thought by Apple Computer, Inc.
Warren Gish
IS&T
Evans Hall
UCBerkeley 94720
cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
Scott R. Anderson
>In article <24...@tekig4.TEK.COM> br...@tekig4.UUCP (Bradford Needham) writes:
>>In article <14...@csib.csi.UUCP> jwhi...@csib.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) writes:
>>>A/UX... comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879)
>>>or an external ($5,549) ... upgrade package....
>>
>>Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
>
>I have. a Sun 3/60 is roughly the same price as a Mac II. You get the Unix
>for free, but it comes on a tape. So, you need to buy a tape drive. You
>can't do anything with it unless you also buy a disk. Conclusion:
>$ for Sun 3/60+disk+tape+unix > $ for MacII + disk + unix.
Well, if you don't mind backing up your 80MB hard disk onto floppies :-).
I suspect that most people will wish they have a tape drive when it
comes time to preserve the UNIX system that arrives on one of those
oh-so-volatile hard disks from Apple. Let's see now...Apple's 40 MB
tape drive is listed at $1500, add it on to the $10000 for the A/UX
development system with ethertalk card, and you'll pay $11500, which
is more than a Sun would cost. And the Sun has a 19" monitor, to boot
(tack on $2000 to get one for the Mac).
>But by the time you've bought decent desktop
>publishing, word processing, spreadsheet, and database software the Mac IIs
>are cheaper again.
Well, if this is what you want, then why buy A/UX? For many people, what
comes standard with Sun UNIX is what they want and need: compilers, graphics,
editors, ethernet, etc. There may be easier-to-use implementations under
the Mac OS, but the UNIX versions are tried and true, and are either standard
or free/cheap (e.g. TeX is ~$500 for the Mac OS).
I think the rule here is: if you want UNIX, get a Sun; if you want the Mac OS,
but sometimes need UNIX (or vice-versa), get a Mac II. (Despite my defense
of Sun, I believe there are powerful reasons to get a Mac, the most important
of which is modularity; i.e. you can get a lot of work done without all of
the standard hardware that makes a Sun so expensive.)
* Scott Robert Anderson
* ** gatech!emoryu1!phssra
* * * ** phssra@emoryu1.{bitnet,csnet}
* * * * * **
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Brian Martin
>
>Apple Finally Gets its UNIX act together - All on a disk
>
>Apple Computer Inc, Curpertino Calif., chose the Uniforum show in Dallas this
>month to introduce A/UX, its version of AT&T Co.'s UNIX System V.2
>operating system. A/UX is designed for Apple's high-end Macintosh II and
>comes preconfigured on either an internal ($4,879) or an external ($5,549)
>80M-byte rigid-disk drive upgrade packge for current users [Ouch! jdw]. ...
>A/UX contains Berkeley UNIX extensions, Network File SYstem, Streams and the
>Macintosh Toolbox, plus functions for automatic booting and recovery.
>That leaves users with 10 M-bytes of free disk space [Ouch again! jdw].
>By preconfiguring the disk, Apple hopes to spare users from hiring UNIX gurus.
I've heard rumors of a 68030 workstation from Apollo priced under $5,000, due
out some time this year. Considering that Apollo supports BSD4.3, System V.3,
X windows, NFS, a sophisticated user interface management system that you can
use to build mac-like interfaces, network computing (an implementation of
course-grained parallel computing using workstations on the network as parallel
processors), and that Apollo supports an AT bus (so that you can add cheap
peripherals) and bundles in your choice of an Ethernet or token ring board,
I wonder if Apple will be forced to drop their Mac II prices. Or would people
be willing to pay a premium just because it's a Macintosh?
Brian
======
Brian K. Martin, M.D.
3420-A Hinahina Street
Honolulu, Hawaii 96816
PHONE: (808) 735-5661
ARPA: uhccux!medix!mar...@nosc.MIL
UUCP: { ihnp4,ucbvax,dcdwest,uunet }!ucsd!nosc!uhccux!medix!martin
Jim Kateley
>with intra-Mac file transfers. BTW: Using MFS floppy intermediaries,
>is it straight forward to transfer a file that is larger than
>the storage capacity of a single floppy disk?
Hmmmm, well if you can stuffit it so it fits on a 400K disk, your all set.
Otherwise,.......I suppose you can use Ethertalk or you could hook
a Mac up as a terminal thru the serial port then use xmodem or kermit.
>
>Warren Gish
>IS&T
>Evans Hall
>UCBerkeley 94720
>cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
--
Ed Tecot
I was shocked to see this as well. So I did a little research. Some
of the information above is misleading, here are the details:
M8011 internal A/UX bundle $3182
contains: (1) M0692 internal HD80 with A/UX
(1) M0693 A/UX accessory kit
M8033 Mac II A/UX upgrade kit $4879
contains: (1) M8011 internal A/UX bundle
(1) M0221 PMMU chip
(2) M0219 2MB RAM Exp. Kit
Kits with an external disk are $100 extra.
What this means:
Those of you who already have the PMMU and necessary RAM need not spend
another 5K to get A/UX, all you need is one of the bundle kits at either
$3182 or $3282.
Some interesting notes:
The retail price on an Apple HD80SC internal is $3199 (I called
Priority One for this price). 2MB expansion kits are $599 apiece
(if you can find a lower price, buy it - this is a good price).
The remaining $499 in the M8033 is for the PMMU.
What surprises me:
Is in retrospect, just how reasonable this is. A/UX is essentially
free with the purchase of an 80 meg hard disk from Apple. Now before
you go say how high that price is (a Jasmine 80 meg drive is about half
that price), keep in mind that this is RETAIL, and actual prices will
come down fast (Priority One sells the 80SC internal for $2779, and I'm
sure you can beat that). In addition, those of you who don't insist on
Apple labels on everything can go to third parties for the PMMU and RAM.
In summary:
Before I did my little research, my opinion was similar to what has shown
up here on the net. Now, with a little more information at my disposal,
it all seems quite reasonable. The moral: Look before you flame (I didn't,
and I got hosed).
_emt
William R. Pearson
The thing to remember about a MacII, as opposed to a Sun 3/50
or Sun 3/60, is that it is an expandable machine with a bus. (One
should also consider that the cost of a Sun 3/60 with a 144 Mbyte
drive and 8 Meg memory + tape is around $19,000 list, let's not
compare Apple list prices with Sun discounted prices). If you want
to get a Sun with any kind of expansion capability, you have to buy
a $25,000 (list) machine. While Apple is going to have to come up
with some way to let people buy A/UX without purchasing an 80 Mbyte
disk (since people are using 300 Mbyte Wren IVs which cost around
$3K), Apple's list prices are NOT out of line with other 68020
offerings, especially for machines with busses.
The prices are farther out of line compared to an IBM PS/2-80
or a Compaq 386/20 with Xenix/Unix/AIS, but again, not so far out
of line compared to those manufacturer's list prices. The problem(?)
is that no manufacturer can compete with a $5000 no-name 386 clone with
a 100 Mbyte drive and Xenix/Unix. But those machines do not offer
a standard graphics interface, the potential to run Mac programs,
or the support of a major manufacturer.
I wonder how many of the net-readers pay list price for
any of these products? Comparing Apple list to Sun/IBM/clone discount
is a bit unfair.
Bill Pearson
w...@virginia.EDU
Chuq Von Rospach
>out some time this year.
>Considering that Apollo supports BSD4.3, System V.3,
>X windows,
>NFS,
well, sort of.
>a sophisticated user interface management system that you can
>use to build mac-like interfaces, network computing (an implementation of
>course-grained parallel computing using workstations on the network as parallel
>processors), and that Apollo supports an AT bus (so that you can add cheap
>peripherals) and bundles in your choice of an Ethernet or token ring board,
>I wonder if Apple will be forced to drop their Mac II prices. Or would people
>be willing to pay a premium just because it's a Macintosh?
I very much doubt it. Two reasons. One, Apollo's don't run Mac software.
A/UX runs a good number of them (I've seen, for instance, Pixel Paint run on
A/UX on Unix files. Wait until you see SFGetFile on a Unix filesystem!).
Second, considering the cost of the 030's, it'd be hard to believe that a
company could come out with an 030 based system that's be cheaper initially
than their 020 based system.
The basic problem with a low end Unix box is that, except for A/UX, they
don't have the caliber of office software available that the mac does. Lots
of people are going to buy Mac's because they can run Unix AND
Excel/Word/PageMaker/etc... it allows them to get rid of one of their
machines. It used to be you had a Unix box for company work, and the Pc/Mac
to do the management stuff. That isn't necessary any more.
Until the low end boxes have mac caliber software, it's going to be VERY
hard for them to go in after Mac environments. The low end unix box is good
for low end unix. It isn't terribly good for spreadsheets, word processing,
etc. The Mac2/AUX is probably more likely to suck out sales from the low end
of the other manufacturers simply because it can run both Unix AND Mac
stuff, not the other way around. I'd LOVE to have sun's at home. I use Mac's
because I can't do what I want to do on Sun's -- write and publish words.
They're great workstations, but vi/emacs/etc don't cut it. So I love my Sun
at work, I love my Macs at home. And I don't expect that to change any time
soon, except maybe I'll get lucky and go to Mac2's and A/UX at home....
chuq (and some folks would happily pay a premium to avoid Apollos....)
Chuq Von Rospach ch...@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ
What do you mean 'You don't really want to hurt her?'
I'm a Super-Villain! That's my Schtick!
Zigurd R. Mednieks
>
>Until the low end boxes have mac caliber software, it's going to be VERY
>hard for them to go in after Mac environments. The low end unix box is good
>for low end unix. It isn't terribly good for spreadsheets, word processing,
>etc. The Mac2/AUX is probably more likely to suck out sales from the low end
>of the other manufacturers simply because it can run both Unix AND Mac
>stuff, not the other way around. I'd LOVE to have sun's at home. I use Mac's
>because I can't do what I want to do on Sun's -- write and publish words.
>They're great workstations, but vi/emacs/etc don't cut it. So I love my Sun
>at work, I love my Macs at home. And I don't expect that to change any time
>soon, except maybe I'll get lucky and go to Mac2's and A/UX at home....
>
not be popular with either Mac or Unix people. If I wanted a Unix,
I would buy a Sun. I would not buy A/UX for my MacII. AU/X is not as
good a Unix as a Sun and it is not as good a Macintosh as a Macintosh
running its own OS. I would get LESS of Unix and Macintosh than I
wanted. I wish Apple (or better yet, Sun) had developed a Unix add-in
card with really good file system integration, so that I could have
both systems without having to buy two boxes, and without having to
deal with an Frankensteinian stitched-together combination of Unix and
the Mac OS.
With Sun's recent accord with AT&T I see no reason to settle for less
than what is the acknowledged standard in Unix OSs, and I see no
reason to ask for compatibility woes for my Macintosh software.
Lastly, I don't have a need to apply Macintosh software to Unix files
by running that software on a Unix system. I would prefer to use a
network and take advantage of the really very good provisions for
foreign file systems built into both Unix and the Mac OS.
I would also bet that A/UX will be at least one step behind both the
Mac OS and SunOS in acquiring the latest and best features of both
those systems. And what will happen when Apple's next-generation OS
debuts? Will they fold that into Unix as well? It all seems like much
more hassle than the it is worth.
So when can I order the SPARC board for my Mac II?
-Zigurd
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zigurd Mednieks MURSU Corporation (617)424-0146
25 Exeter Street
Boston, MA 02116
gil...@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
The appalling thing is that Apple told users to go out and buy an 80
megabyte disk so they could run A/UX. Now Apple turns around, says
"throw away your disk, purchase OUR disk instead". I'm suprised their
is no outcry at this bait & switch tactic.
It reminds me of the ticket scalper that charges $16.50 for the NFL
tickets, and $100 for the envelope. You don't buy the envelope, you
don't get the tickets......
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gil...@p.cs.uiuc.edu}
Charles L Ditzel
# Mac II
# cpu,4MB,80disk+unix,PMMU 8400
# external 80MB disk 3200
# ethertalk card 700
# 4MB memory (8 total) 1200
# 19" 3rd party mono. monitor 2000
# tape backup (40MB) 1500
# TOTAL $17,000
Does the Mac show up with 4 bitplanes or eight?
The Sun 3/60 comes in with 8.
# Sun
# 3/50 with 4MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), mono monitor = $11,500
# 3/60 with 8MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), mono monitor = $16,400
And after it all said and done, the Sun's with DMA winds up faster
and can run NeWS (which is a real win). And I would pick a
user configurable (icon-based) desktop with user configurable menus
any day (i'm talking about Suntools/SunView)...plus running under NeWS
you get it all ... NeWS,SunView and X (soon SunView II).
Charles L Ditzel
> I've heard rumors of a 68030 workstation from Apollo priced under $5,000, due
> out some time this year. Considering that Apollo supports BSD4.3, System V.3,
> X windows, NFS, a sophisticated user interface management system that you can
> use to build mac-like interfaces, network computing (an implementation of
implementations, in fact I am extremely disappointed in their implementation.
I use SR 9.6 and it is full of problems...a normal user can kill a root
owned process(!!), tcp/ip is fraught with problems, cron requires a kluge
to make it work, Unix/Aegis permission conflict ... as a person who
tries not to get fooled twice...I will pass on any 68030 Apollo...besides what
are you going to do when (RUMOR IN PROGRESS) Sun releases their SPARC PC :) .
(Sparc can continue to be scaled upwards...it now runs between 7-10 MIPS,
while the 68030 will remain the 68030).
> course-grained parallel computing using workstations on the network as parallel
> processors), and that Apollo supports an AT bus (so that you can add cheap
> peripherals) and bundles in your choice of an Ethernet or token ring board,
Since tcp/ip is great at locking up your pttys your ethernet board may be
of short term use.
> I wonder if Apple will be forced to drop their Mac II prices. Or would people
> be willing to pay a premium just because it's a Macintosh?
I bought sun...but i would take a Mac II with A/UX over an Apollo any day to
save me the grief.
Pierce T. Wetter
>M8011 internal A/UX bundle $3182
> contains: (1) M0692 internal HD80 with A/UX
> (1) M0693 A/UX accessory kit
>
>The retail price on an Apple HD80SC internal is $3199 (I called
Wait!!!! That means that its _cheaper_ to buy a 80 meg Hard Disk with
A/UX on it. Delete unix, and then use the disk then to buy the disk plain?
Pierce Wetter
"All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us
sane."
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>I've heard rumors of a 68030 workstation from Apollo priced under $5,000, due
>out some time this year. Considering that Apollo supports BSD4.3, System V.3,
>X windows, NFS, a sophisticated user interface management system that you can
>use to build mac-like interfaces, network computing (an implementation of
>course-grained parallel computing using workstations on the network as parallel
>processors), and that Apollo supports an AT bus (so that you can add cheap
>peripherals) and bundles in your choice of an Ethernet or token ring board,
>I wonder if Apple will be forced to drop their Mac II prices. Or would people
>be willing to pay a premium just because it's a Macintosh?
That's exactly it. Remember, your Mac II running A/UX can also run real live
useful applications as well (not that Unix isn't useful, but...). The Apollo,
on the other hand, runs what in the way of software? I don't know, but it
sure ain't as good as Illustrator, PageMaker, etc., etc. And please, no
flames from the TeX/troff junkies... :-)
To paraphrase Mr. Oster, "A Mac II makes a poor Apollo, and an Apollo makes a
poor Mac II."
By the way, the only "sophisticated user interface management system" I've seen
running on an Apollo (or a Sun for that matter) looks suspiciously like
multiple color windows with lots of scrolling text in them. Whoopee! :-)
--
Steve Baumgarten | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
Davis Polk & Wardwell | remember, we were way ahead of you."
...!cmcl2!esquire!sbb | - David Letterman
David W. Berry
In article <69...@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> cswa...@enzyme.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Warren Gish) writes:
> (2) only a single Mac application can run at a time
> (3) no color support for Mac applications under A/UX
> (4) file transfers between an A/UX disk partition and
> a MacOS partition must be made thru an MFS floppy
> disk intermediary
> (5) Apple estimates only about 1% or less of the current MacOS
> applications will run under A/UX in their present form
> (although the changes necessary for A/UX toolbox-compatibility
> are said to be quite small)
Included in the list that does run though are: FullPaint, FullWrite,
MacDraw, MacProject, Adobe Illustrator and host of thousands, well
hundreds, well at least 10. On the bright side, several applications
I've written under MPW have compiled under A/UX and run just fine,
and vice-versa.
> (6) extra hardware must be purchased in order to use LocalTalk
> for printing on a LaserWriter or other communications
The LaserWriter is supported as a serial printer. Though as indicated
above, the toolbox does not yet support printing. Transcript works
fine.
>
>Also, the MacII can not be configured to automatically boot A/UX
>when powered on -- but maybe there will be a MacOS CDEV+INIT sometime
>in the future that will automatically boot A/UX after the MacOS comes up?
>The power switch on the MacII will require that the unit be physically
>turned back on after an interruption of AC power, unless (I'm guessing)
>the power-on switch is taped down.
Hmm. You got misinformed on this one. The MacII boots A/UX
automagically just fine. You set the startup application to "Sash"
the standalone shell, a macintosh application which let's you do all
kinds of nifty stuff. You set sash to automatically boot unix after
a timeout (default = 20 sec.). Voila, A/UX boots automatically and
you get a chance to interrupt it in case you want to play macintosh
for awhile. You are, however, correct in that if power is interrupted
you have to manually intervene to get the system powered up. Perhaps
the solution is to get a UPS :-)
>
>According to MacWeek, some of the toolbox deficiencies (1-4?) are scheduled
>to be fixed this summer. Until then, it appears to me that the current
>release of the A/UX toolbox is really to allow developers to prepare for
>a summer A/UX marketing fest.
Actually, it's quite usuable, the restriction that really
hurts it not allowing printing, but for most of what I do I don't
print very often.
>
>Are there any UN*X gurus out there that can tell us what A/UX,
>with its System V Release 2-compatibility, lacks in comparison
>to what NeXT is rumored to have in its System V Release 3?
>Isn't Release 3 what AT&T is trying to standardize the world upon?
>
>Hey, Apple! Say it ain't so, that all us MacII owners that already
>bought 5 MB RAM and an 80 MB disk don't have to buy it all again just
>to get A/UX. @#%&!
A/UX is only distributed on 80MB drives, so yes, you get
to buy one of those all over. The memory you have is perfectly
usable though.
>
>Warren Gish
>IS&T
>Evans Hall
>Berkeley, CA 94720
>cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
--
David W. Berry
d...@well.uucp dwb@Delphi
d...@apple.com 973-...@408.MaBell
Disclaimer: Apple doesn't even know I have an opinion and certainly
wouldn't want if they did.
Robert K. Shull
In article <16...@ssc-vax.UUCP> ben...@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:
>In article <8...@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>, p...@SPEECH1.CS.CMU.EDU (Paul Dietz) writes:
>> In article <24...@tekig4.TEK.COM> br...@tekig4.UUCP (Bradford Needham) writes:
>> >I'm constantly amazed at Apple's marketing sense of humor.
>> >Haven't they priced Sun's lately?
>> I wonder if the powers-that-be realize just how much they have priced
>> themselves out of the UNIX market? I gather that I wasn't alone in
>I believe this is just beginning of Apple's attempt into the Unix market
>but somehow it is not convincing. I bought a Sun 3/60...
Why assume that Apple's policy is never going to change? They were
already discussing changes in availability/pricing at Uniforum. Your making a
judgment less than a week after the product announcement.
Also, Sun's version of Unix still has major problems after years of
upgrades, especially with networking. The networking code in A/UX can
do things that are not currently possible with Sun's.
Also, consider support. Sun is fine if you're with a major company or
university (someone who purchase hundreds of machines), but support is
extremely expensive for an individual. Unless Apple departs from their
usual policies, support will be tolerable (expensive compared to most
personal computers, very inexpensive compared to most professional machines)
Anyway, good luck with your Sun.
Robert
--
Robert K. Shull
University of Oklahoma, Engineering Computer Network
ihnp4!occrsh!uokmax!rob CIS 73765,1254 Delphi RKSHULL
Opinions contained herein in no way reflect those of the University of Oklahoma.
Charles L Ditzel
> The thing to remember about a MacII, as opposed to a Sun 3/50
> or Sun 3/60, is that it is an expandable machine with a bus. (One
True. Although the Sun 3/60 is expandable to 24 megabytes of memory.
I bought my Sun because I wanted a Unix machine...I like Macs but I
would never invest in a Mac II ... it's a machine looking for a niche.
I would probably pick up an SE. I am impressed with Plus and SE. There
relativily cheap and would do the things I would need. The Mac II is
no Unix workstation. On the low end the 3/50 with 141 meg is also a
decent machine...a 3/50 + 141 meg disk + Mac Plus < Mac II.
> should also consider that the cost of a Sun 3/60 with a 144 Mbyte
> drive and 8 Meg memory + tape is around $19,000 list, let's not
whoa! i don't have my sun price list handy but...for $14,900+450=$15,350
gets you :
---------------------
(I forget but for an additional 1-2K you can get the 141 mbyte disk.
Subtract $1-2K for monochrome.)
Hardware :
A Sun 3/60
*20 Mhz 68020
*16" color (1152x900),
(monochrome is cheaper - still 1152x900) 1 bit bw
(hi rez mono also available -1600x1280, don't know the price) 1 bit bw
*8 bitplanes,
*4 meg ram,
*71 mbyte disk,
*60 Meg tape drive,
*Ethernet card
*Naturally FPU and MMU
*DMA
*optical mouse :)
Software
*SunOS (Unix),
*Fortran,
*C,
*Pascal,
*Suntools (clock, defaultsedit,lock, perf,mouse editor, mail, iconeditor,
shelltools,fonttool, dbxtool (mouse based debugger based on dbx)
etc.), Customizable menu system.
*nroff Unix tools (that all those PC-based Unix guys like to unbundle)
*Libraries (all the usual Unix stuff)
*SunView library(2D CGI-based primitives) and
*SunView II libraries based on NeWS/X (summer-fall)
*SunCore library (3D Core standard,handle rotation transforms, etc)
*NeWS library will be standard in NeWS/X (summer-fall)
*X11 library will be standard in NeWS/X (summer-fall)
*X11 is available from MIT now ($150 or free)
*NeWS (now optional $100 will become standard)
*postscript shell
*postscript previewer
*NeWS server
*etc.
*NFS (Network File System - networking software)
Documentation
*FULL* the Unix documentation plus Sun's documentation : primers on
Unix, Suntools, SunPro, etc.
---------------------
I am probably forgetting something.
I should mention that Sun is rumored to have a Sun 386 pending
arrival relatively soon.
Okay take the above prices and now begin discounting...:)
To do any type of development (except maybe Mac OS) I would buy Sun.
The Sun 3/60 is comparable in performance to Apollo's new high/low end
DN 4000...but the software, documentation and hardware is much better
in my opinion.
> compare Apple list prices with Sun discounted prices). If you want
As can be seen the prices quoted seem pretty much in line with Sun
list prices. Sun is extremely competitive and your University/Company
probably get discounts on the order 20-40% - for all i know more.
> to get a Sun with any kind of expansion capability, you have to buy
> a $25,000 (list) machine. While Apple is going to have to come up
Again, it depends on what you want to do...for example the NuBus from
Apple typically has some very expensive 24 bit graphics cards. Their
aren't yet a whole lot of things out.
The VME bus (what Apple SHOULD have gone with, instead of their 10Mhz
bus) has alot more going for it. LISP coprocessors, frame grabbers,
graphics coprocessors, etc. Apple played some games in the design of
their NuBus...(read the Mac Today article recently written on the
Mac NuBus to get more information). Incidentally the recent announcement
of the Sun 4/110 (low high end -7 MIPS) at under 19K bodes well for
Sun dropping their Sun 4 line prices...
> with some way to let people buy A/UX without purchasing an 80 Mbyte
> disk (since people are using 300 Mbyte Wren IVs which cost around
> $3K), Apple's list prices are NOT out of line with other 68020
> offerings, especially for machines with busses.
Except with no DMA,
> The prices are farther out of line compared to an IBM PS/2-80
> or a Compaq 386/20 with Xenix/Unix/AIS, but again, not so far out
> of line compared to those manufacturer's list prices. The problem(?)
> is that no manufacturer can compete with a $5000 no-name 386 clone with
> a 100 Mbyte drive and Xenix/Unix. But those machines do not offer
> a standard graphics interface, the potential to run Mac programs,
> or the support of a major manufacturer.
Again what impact 386 Sun running Unix with all or most of the above???
> I wonder how many of the net-readers pay list price for
> any of these products? Comparing Apple list to Sun/IBM/clone discount
Again the price I gave, I believe is list. (i'm-sure-i'll-here-if-its-not)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The Opinions expressed are my own. No one else would have them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles L Ditzel
> That's exactly it. Remember, your Mac II running A/UX can also run real live
> useful applications as well (not that Unix isn't useful, but...). The Apollo,
> on the other hand, runs what in the way of software? I don't know, but it
> sure ain't as good as Illustrator, PageMaker, etc., etc. And please, no
> flames from the TeX/troff junkies... :-)
Illustrator look positively primitive, ever heard of FrameMaker and Interleaf?
Ever see these on a 1600x1280 screen? If you live at all in a technical
world - which clearly it doesn't sound like you do - Apollos and Suns run
*lots* of engineering, CAD/CAM, medical applications. Have you ever seen
NeWS (ever seen a circular window?). Get serious the Mac II has a *long*
way to go before ever being considered an "engineering workstation" let
alone a workstation.
>
> To paraphrase Mr. Oster, "A Mac II makes a poor Apollo, and an Apollo makes a
> poor Mac II."
> By the way, the only "sophisticated user interface management system"
>I've seen > running on an Apollo (or a Sun for that matter) looks
>suspiciously like multiple color windows with lots of scrolling text in them. >Whoopee! :-)
workstations generally. It might be worthwhile to check out "Ideas",
ComputerVisions CAD 4X, etc.
NeWS on the Sun is a networkable window system that *understands*
postscript. You can preview postscript graphics, etc.
*I'm sorry, I suddenly am beginning to understand...go back to your
Missile Attack game on your Mac* :)
David Collier-Brown
| In article <42...@sun.uucp> ch...@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
| Until the low end boxes have mac caliber software, it's going to be VERY
| hard for them to go in after Mac environments. The low end unix box is good
| for low end unix. It isn't terribly good for spreadsheets, word processing,
| etc. The Mac2/AUX is probably more likely to suck out sales from the low end
| of the other manufacturers simply because it can run both Unix AND Mac
| stuff, not the other way around.
|
In article <81...@eddie.MIT.EDU> z...@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks) writes:
| It's odd that Chuck would think this way. My feeling is that A/UX will
| not be popular with either Mac or Unix people. If I wanted a Unix,
| I would buy a Sun. I would not buy A/UX for my MacII. AU/X is not as
| good a Unix as a Sun and it is not as good a Macintosh as a Macintosh
| running its own OS. I would get LESS of Unix and Macintosh than I
| wanted.
Well, I'm a Unix people, and I found that I could have almost
anything that I actually **use** on unix on a mac, even before A/UX.
In the process of laying groundwork for A/UX, Apple made MPW
sufficiently Unix-like that porting simple programs was trivial.
The worst time I had was porting wart (a yacc-like DFA compiler),
because I had brain-damaged it in a port to a customer's MuSh-DOS
box. That took an extra 10 to 20 minutes...
I seriously expect that A/UX will deliver more ease of use to
experienced Unix programmers than Sun (I've used both: horses for
courses). I also seriously believe that many Mac-specific programs
will run under A/UX, and will be welcomed by Unix programmers.
--dave (you mean you **like** dbx?) c-b
--
David Collier-Brown. {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its
350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind)
CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.
ephraim vishniac
>Both Apollo and Sun run desktop publishing packages that make
>PageMaker and Illustrator look positively primitive, ever heard of
>FrameMaker and Interleaf?
Yes. My boss has Interleaf on his Mac II. I've got it here on my Sun,
too, and it drives me nuts in both implementations. Can you say
"random menu structure"? Why is it that menus with many of the
same commands have them in different orders, or even in different
sub-menus? Interleaf (or "Interloss" as one of my co-workers calls
it) does some things very well, but it has serious flaws.
>Have you ever seen NeWS (ever seen a circular window?).
No, I haven't seen NeWS, and Yes, I've seen a circular window. I've
got a program for the Mac that includes WDEF's for a circular window,
windows with holes in them, and other kinds of bizarre windows. You
can paste them into existing applications (or your system file). No
sweat. Hasn't caught on though. What use is a circular window?
>Get serious the Mac II has a *long* way to go before ever being
>considered an "engineering workstation" let alone a workstation.
By you, certainly so. But we already knew that.
Ephraim Vishniac eph...@think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation / 245 First Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1214
William R. Pearson
I am reading this article on a SUN3/50 with a 71 Mbyte disk,
60 Mbyte tape cartridge, and 4 Meg of memory that costs (list) about
$10000. I think that it is great for unix software development, reading
news, and ftp'ing stuff across the country.
At home I have a MacII, and I suppose that if I bought it this
week with A/UX, and then added a tape drive, (which A/UX does not
currently support I read) it would cost a little more than $10,000.
I don't have A/UX, but I love my Mac. Before I got the machine,
I had no idea how much I needed programs that saved pictures in a common
format (PICT), and editors that could combine documents with this format.
Writing programs for the Mac is an incredible pain, but once they work,
and then use PICT windows or text windows that can be copied to other
places, they are great.
I can't do anything like that with my sun.
So an earlier observation is certainly correct, a sun makes a poor
MacII and a MacII makes a poor sun. But I am happy with my MacII, and would
buy it over the sun, because it will take a lot less to get the MacII
to become a (albeit 80%) sun than it will to get the sun to become a MacII.
(And it is not at all clear how useful my Sun would be without the $200,000
of University network support).
Bill Pearson
wrp@virginia
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>Illustrator look positively primitive, ever heard of FrameMaker and Interleaf?
>Ever see these on a 1600x1280 screen? If you live at all in a technical
>world - which clearly it doesn't sound like you do - Apollos and Suns run
>*lots* of engineering, CAD/CAM, medical applications. Have you ever seen
>NeWS (ever seen a circular window?). Get serious the Mac II has a *long*
>way to go before ever being considered an "engineering workstation" let
>alone a workstation.
Never said it compared as a workstation. But circular windows... gee! I
guess I'm wrong -- Sun's have it all over Mac's for serious work...
You Sun guys take everything so seriously... chill out. And I thought people
here in NY were tense. Actually, for serious typesetting, I'll take troff or
TeX on our Pyramids any day. 10 MIPS? Whoopee! My thumb is on my nose and
I'm wiggling my fingers...
Have a nice day...
[ :-), in case you still don't get it. ]
Ken Wallich
>you will "need" 160 MB to run a Unix system?
----------
What about those of us who chose to buy 160MB discs (almost everyones 160MB
drives are cheeper that Apples 80MB drive anyway :-). We now are being
told we MUST buy the drives we previously refused to (after all, they were
overpriced and slow), if we want to get A/UX. Someone from Apple posted a
response somewhere around here telling us that "The Apple tape drive is NOT
CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UNDER A/UX". Tells me I don't have much choice, so my
choice is gonna be to buy someone elses UNIX box, and use my MacII to run
"BetaWare" like Fullwrite (:-).
brap
--------------------
Ken Wallich *My views are mine, and mine alone*
Consultant "No mystical energy field controls MY destiny"
DCI kwal...@hpsmtc1.HP.COM
@Hewlett Packard ...hplabs!hpsmtc1!kwallich
"If we weren't all crazy, we'd all go INSANE"
Phil Ronzone
>
>The appalling thing is that Apple told users to go out and buy an 80
>megabyte disk so they could run A/UX. Now Apple turns around, says
>"throw away your disk, purchase OUR disk instead". I'm suprised their
>is no outcry at this bait & switch tactic.
Sigh. Well, let me apologize for the fact that we here at Apple do NOT
have the most perfect corporation in the world. (I do think we have a
corporate plan for implementing a perfect coporation in the next quarter
however.) :-) :-) :-)
The Apple Tape Backup Unit is a SCSI device. The A/UX SCSI manager is, by
design, exceptionally robust. To ensure that the SCSI manager meets the
design goals of being very very robust, the source code was frozen at a
certain point. The Apple Tape Backup Unit was not ready for the A/UX source
code freeze. So, voila, no A/UX native support for the tape unit, hence,
aaarrrggghhhhh (Apple Marketing & Sales dying screams into the sunset ...)
no A/UX distribution on tape.
We did go begging on our knees to the Mac OS guys doing the Mac tape unit
software, and the next (soon very very soon) of release of Mac OS software
for the tape unit WILL support dumping and restoring of A/UX partitions on
an Apple HD80. NO plans right now for A/UX distribution on tape however.
Why you ask (scream)? Well, to the Apple factory, A/UX is no simple product.
For example, in ONE fell swoop, the A/UX manuals (all 6000+ pages of 'em)
DOUBLED the entire amount of Apple documentation in print. More important
are the "bundles", or configurations that the factory must produce. I.e.,
full A/UX systems, A/UX on an internal hard disk without a PMMU, A/UX on
an internal hard disk WITH a PMMU, A/UX on an external hard disk with and
without a PMMU, with and without various extra DRAM upgrades, with and
without manuals ...
A tape distribution right now would almost DOUBLE some of the configurations.
And all of this on a factory which likes to think in terms of a few
floppies (System Disk, Utilities, etc.).
But, we are getting there. Believe me, we winced a lot when we realized
that the tape unit would not be supported in the first release.
And, as for cost, well, PLEASE make sure that you are comparing retail
to retail! I was "beat upon" by a University professor for being much
more expensive that his favorite workstation. I pointed out that he
was comparing our price for a purchase of 100 units .vs. the price for
brand-X for 1200 units. End result, our price for 1000 units was cheaper
than brand-X at 1200.
Anyway, A/UX is our hard work - we here in Engineering finally get our
turn to be on the receiving end of criticisms, suggestions, etc. - and
we DO listen hard. Just like a Mac .vs. a PC, try A/UX. You will like it.
Remember - it is a Mac. Under A/UX or the Mac OS, you have the Toolbox
and the Mac look and feel. Ain't nobody else got that ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philip K. Ronzone, A/UX Technical Manager APPLELINK: RONZONE1
Apple Computer, Mail Stop 27AJ, 10500 N. DeAnza Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014
UUCP: ...!{sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual,unisoft}!apple!phil
Eric Lavitsky
>In article <3...@esquire.UUCP>, s...@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) writes:
>> That's exactly it. Remember, your Mac II running A/UX can also run real live
>> useful applications as well (not that Unix isn't useful, but...). The Apollo,
>> on the other hand, runs what in the way of software? I don't know, but it
>> sure ain't as good as Illustrator, PageMaker, etc., etc. And please, no
>> flames from the TeX/troff junkies... :-)
>Both Apollo and Sun run desktop publishing packages that make PageMaker and
>Illustrator look positively primitive, ever heard of FrameMaker and Interleaf?
>Ever see these on a 1600x1280 screen? If you live at all in a technical
>world - which clearly it doesn't sound like you do - Apollos and Suns run
>*lots* of engineering, CAD/CAM, medical applications. Have you ever seen
>NeWS (ever seen a circular window?). Get serious the Mac II has a *long*
>way to go before ever being considered an "engineering workstation" let
>alone a workstation.
Er, you may be right, but your basis isn't completely correct...
Interleaf runs on a Mac II - I saw it at DEXPO yesterday.
A Mac II (probably a vanilla Mac as well) can have circular windows - I
also saw it at DEXPO yesterday (yea, a round clock on the Mac Desktop - neat!).
But I'm an Amiga fan, so what the hell - I'd sorely like to have a 19 inch
color hi-res monitor (my heart lusts for one), but for now I'll settle with
the 13 inch 1Kx800 monitor that CBM is beta testing now...
>NeWS on the Sun is a networkable window system that *understands*
>postscript. You can preview postscript graphics, etc.
No reason why it couldn't be ported to run under A/UX ...
>*I'm sorry, I suddenly am beginning to understand...go back to your
>Missile Attack game on your Mac* :)
It's not nice to talk down to people on the net ;-)
Eric
ARPA: er...@topaz.rutgers.edu "Lithium is no longer available
UUCP: ...{wherever!}ulysses!eric on credit..."
...{wherever!}rutgers!topaz!eric - from Buckaroo Banzai
SNAIL: 34 Maplehurst Ln, Piscataway, NJ 08854
Charles L Ditzel
> Yes. My boss has Interleaf on his Mac II. I've got it here on my Sun,
> too, and it drives me nuts in both implementations. Can you say
screen it would be even better. Having looked at Frame on a Sun, both
still are much better than Pagemaker for documentation. Frame should not
even be compared to Pagemaker.
> "random menu structure"? Why is it that menus with many of the
> same commands have them in different orders, or even in different
> sub-menus? Interleaf (or "Interloss" as one of my co-workers calls
> it) does some things very well, but it has serious flaws.
chooses. Though I would much rather work in Interleaf than Pagemaker.
Frame seems far beyond both. Incidentally most of the people I know
seem to work rather productivily in Interleaf.
> >Have you ever seen NeWS (ever seen a circular window?).
>
> No, I haven't seen NeWS, and Yes, I've seen a circular window. I've
> got a program for the Mac that includes WDEF's for a circular window,
> windows with holes in them, and other kinds of bizarre windows. You
> can paste them into existing applications (or your system file). No
> sweat. Hasn't caught on though. What use is a circular window?
NeWS is a *networking* window system that is viewed by most
unjaundiced eyes to be superior to X11. NeWS is entirely Postscript
based and as such has a postscript shell, postscript previewer, etc.
The Postscript extensions Sun put into NeWS make it an object-oriented,
NeWS should be hitting the Mac world soon in the form of a port for
A/UX (multi-tasking networking) and a port for Mac OS (non-multi-tasking).
If you follow the discussions in comp.windows.misc much discussion has
centered on NeWS and X11. I think when it does, it will be extremely
popular.
Robert K. Shull
>CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UNDER A/UX". Tells me I don't have much choice, so my
>choice is gonna be to buy someone elses UNIX box, and use my MacII to run
>"BetaWare" like Fullwrite (:-).
My choice is to wait a little while, until Apple's policies (and implementation)
steady down (like they always have in the past).
I've had too much experience with Sun to ever consider purchasing one of their
boxes personally, and been told too much about the 386 versions of Unix (by
people I trust) to want one of those.
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>drives are cheeper that Apples 80MB drive anyway :-). We now are being
>told we MUST buy the drives we previously refused to (after all, they were
>overpriced and slow), if we want to get A/UX. Someone from Apple posted a
>response somewhere around here telling us that "The Apple tape drive is NOT
>CURRENTLY SUPPORTED UNDER A/UX". Tells me I don't have much choice, so my
>choice is gonna be to buy someone elses UNIX box, and use my MacII to run
>"BetaWare" like Fullwrite (:-).
A Unix that doesn't support ANY tape devices? And how do we do backups?
I like the Mac, and I like Unix, but there's no way I'd use a Unix that didn't
support some form of backup device (other than floppies -- I'm not too fond
of doing 100 disk backups once a week :-)) even if it were free (which it
ain't).
Face it guys (including you guys at Apple) -- the Sun folks have us here.
I'm looking forward to the *real* A/UX release...
And in response to the complaint from one of the Apple folk that including
tapes would double the number of "packages" that had to be supported, how
about selling things in separate packages, but just charging differently
depending on whether they're bought together? That way you have 1 box for
manuals, 1 box for A/UX on disk, 1 box for A/UX on tape, 1 box for PMMU,
etc., not an ever-expanding number of "packages." Geesh, guys, this product
isn't exactly going to be sold like Mircrosoft Word... it's UNIX! People
aren't going to be walking into their local dealers in droves and picking
the things off the shelves ("do you also have the documentation in blue?").
There, I feel much better. :-)
Radford Neal
> ... I'm not talking about a game.
> NeWS is a *networking* window system that is viewed by most
^^^^^^^^^^^^
> unjaundiced eyes to be superior to X11. NeWS is entirely Postscript
^^^^^^^^^^
> based and as such has a postscript shell, postscript previewer, etc.
^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^
> The Postscript extensions Sun put into NeWS make it an object-oriented,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> NeWS should be hitting the Mac world soon in the form of a port for
> A/UX (multi-tasking networking) and a port for Mac OS (non-multi-tasking).
> If you follow the discussions in comp.windows.misc much discussion has
> centered on NeWS and X11. I think when it does, it will be extremely
> popular.
Only, I hope, if they fix the bugs. The initial release rivals MicroSoft
Word 3.0 in flakyness. These two products make me wonder whether all the
stuff I teach students about the importance of reliability is wrong. The
market seems to like bells and whistles more than quality.
^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^
Radford Neal
PS: Doesn't anyone but me think that Word 3.01 is *still* flaky? My
favourite is its occasional tendency to crash if you customize the
menus - you then can't start Word until you delete its settings file
from your system folder. Don't tell me it works for you - *most* of
its bugs are non-deterministic. I think they clear random bits in
their idle routine just to keep the users hopping :-) (or is that
hoping? hyping? ...)
Robert Joseph Hammen
>
> Also, consider support. Sun is fine if you're with a major company or
>university (someone who purchase hundreds of machines), but support is
>extremely expensive for an individual. Unless Apple departs from their
>usual policies, support will be tolerable (expensive compared to most
>personal computers, very inexpensive compared to most professional machines)
This brings to mind another question: who exactly is going to sell A/UX? I
presume that there will be some sort of dealer qualification program (like
there was with the Mac II), but sometimes I shudder to think what dealers
who can't even sell/support RAM upgrades would do with something like A/UX.
Or will the product be sold only through the corporate sales force?
=========================================================================
Robert Hammen Computer Applications ham...@csd4.milw.wisc.edu
Delphi: HAMMEN GEnie: R.Hammen CI$: 70701,2104
Jeff Meyer
everyday and have been a MacGuy for about three years, I thought I should
comment:
No question that, for page layout, FrameMaker is the easiest to use, and
gives you quite a bit of power. It's always struck me as an improved
Ready-Set-Go! program than PageMaker, and it supports Word Processing far
more than PageMaker. I just wish you could move the cursor inside prompt
boxes with the mouse (talk about culture shock).
However, I have a lot of friends who are graphic artists in Seattle who have
a love-hate relationship with PageMaker. They hate the interface, but it
gives them the extra 30% to do certain things that no other product allows
them to do (including FrameMaker -- I had two of them examine it and point
out it's deficiencies in detail). They'd prefer using a better interface,
but PageMaker 3.0 is the only program out there with the power to do the
really fancy stuff they want, for advertising displays, flyers, etc. These
are the people who send their stuff off to a Linotronics for printing (1200
dpi).
PS Having used FullWrite Professional for some time, there are some very
nice things there that I haven't seen in ANY other word processing/page
layout program, anywhere (Suns, Apollos, etc.) and which really show
up FrameMaker and InterLeaf.
PPS One question: why hasn't Apple's legal pit bulls gone after FrameMaker
for "user interface infringement" or whatever? Not that I approve of
the policy, but FrameMaker uses a LOT of Apple conventions, right down
to the little dialog boxes with the word ballons with "!" and "*" in
them? And I thought Sun and Apple weren't getting along...
"On the other hand, it takes real moral fiber to
remain a Republican when there's no money in it.
And things *are* looking grim on the financial
front. Even worse for the President, they're
getting confusing."
-- A. Whitney Brown
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: mori...@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
CREDO: You gotta be Cruel to be Kind...
<*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>
Roy Smith
Last summer we got the FrameMaker demo tape. I was pretty
impressed with what it could do, but had a few major gripes. We were
running it on diskless 3/50's and it took a full 2 minutes to start up;
printing out various little messages about how it was reading fonts, etc.
Does anybody know if newer versions are any faster? It also ate up most of
the available memory, making it kind of hard to get anything else done.
One nice feature of FrameMaker was that if you didn't have a
license for a particular workstation, you could still run maker in
read-only mode.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Chuq Von Rospach
>impressed with what it could do, but had a few major gripes. We were
>running it on diskless 3/50's and it took a full 2 minutes to start up;
>printing out various little messages about how it was reading fonts, etc.
>Does anybody know if newer versions are any faster?
Newer versions are significantly faster than the demo.
Chuq Von Rospach ch...@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, President, Digital Equiptment, 1977
Paul Smethers
>
>cpu,4MB,80disk+unix,PMMU 8400
>external 80MB disk 3200
>ethertalk card 700
>4MB memory (8 total) 1200
>TOTAL $17,000
>
>Sun
>3/50 with 4MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), monochrome monitor
> $11,500
>3/60 with 8MB Ram, 144MB disk, tape backup (60MB), monochrome monitor
> $16,400
>
> MIPS: floating DMA Max SIMM slots
> point RAM on
> chip motherboard
>Sun 3/50 1.5 optional ? 4 0
>Mac II 2? yes no 8
>Sun 3/60 3 yes yes 24 0
Well I don't know the SUN addon market at all but I know the Mac one very
well and your total for the MacII is way off. Memory prices are approaching
$450 per 2 meg simm. It's possible to get a CMS 80 meg drive for about $1400.
Tape backup systems can be had for a $1000. A smart buyer can have the system
proposed for about $3000 less if he gets all his memory from discount
suppliers, and thats still paying retail for the mac and A/UX. But it gets
even better.
Try this same system out:
$4,000 - MacII - 1 meg ram - 1 floppy and keyboard.
$2,000 - 19 inch third party monitor monochrome.
$2,000 - 8 megs ram from anyone but apple.
$2,000 - fast 150 meg hard drive. (magicdrive - this month's macworld)
$700 - ethernet.
$700 - 60 meg tape drive.
$400 - PMMU.
$500 - A/UX.
$12,100 - Total.
The point is that the aftermarket for the mac can offer some great deals
and that I don't know if thats true of SUN. Also the low end SUNS have no
Nubus and that is one worthwile attachment. You may question my A/UX price
but what no-one has said is that you can get right - to copy licenses for
$483 per copy, so one doesn't have to pay apples inflated hardware prices. One
other nice attachment that I don't know that sun offers yet is an add-on
68030 with 68882 at 25mhrz for about $2500 (Macintosh Today, Feb 23, page 3)
so your system can run at 8-10 mips for about $15,000 total.
But the truth of the matter is that the SUN at 3 mips is probably faster
than a MacII at 10. It's disk access is probably 10-20 times faster. SUN UNIX
is cutting edge top of the line, and if apple did well they probably copied it.
For UNIX work there is still no choice but SUN, and with their mantle of
leadership you know your machine will be at the forefront of new technology,
namely SPARC. Lets face it, SUN leads the industry around by the nose.
BUt I'm just happy to have the chance to have UNIX on a Mac. Perhaps if they get an 030 MacII made they'll be able to skip the PMMU and save some cash.
Randy Hill
SmethersBarnes
(My opinion's are my own, and damn good ones too!)
John Gilmore
> We did go begging on our knees to the Mac OS guys doing the Mac tape unit
> software, and the next (soon very very soon) of release of Mac OS software
> for the tape unit WILL support dumping and restoring of A/UX partitions on
> an Apple HD80.
I haven't seen one, but what I have heard is that the Apple 40MB tape
drive is slow, slow, slow. For "super reliability" it writes everything
three times on the tape, cutting the speed by a factor of three.
There is a slim chance that when the SCSI tape support is released, it
might work with third party tape drives that provide higher speed and
better price/performance than Apple's. But only if you, the customers,
demand it.
Our Mac-II is ethernetted to a Sun with both cartridge and 6520 BPI
magtape anyway. The more serious problem is that they left *dump* and
*restore* off the Unix distribution! We have to do backups with tar,
which doesn't support incremental backups.
--
{pyramid,ptsfa,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu g...@toad.com
"Watch me change my world..." -- Liquid Theatre
John Gilmore
> Remember - it is a Mac. Under A/UX or the Mac OS, you have the Toolbox
> and the Mac look and feel. Ain't nobody else got that ...
This claim requires some looking behind the hype.
Under the MacOS, you indeed get the Toolbox and the Mac look and feel.
Under A/UX, you can run a small subset of Mac applications -- the ones
that strictly follow the latest guidelines for cleanliness. However,
there is no convenient way to transfer a Mac application from its home
on Mac floppies or hard disk, into the Unix file system. There is a
program that will read 400K, non-HFS floppies and extract the files
therein. There is *no* way to read standard 800K MacOS floppies, or an
HFS floppy, or an HFS disk partition, from Unix. I suppose you could
get a second mac, and transfer the programs and all their data files
over with xmodem, but I doubt many people will bother. It's easier to
shutdown A/UX and reboot the MacOS.
Under A/UX, you have access to the Toolbox. It's a library in /lib.
If you have source for a Mac application, you can do some of the
Toolbox calls, compile it, link it with this library, and they work.
However, you can only run one such application at a time -- it takes
over the whole screen, and you can't get to Unix any more, except over
the serial ports or Ethernet. No control-Z. No multiple windows. You
are either in the application or you are talking to a Unix shell, not
both. There is no equivalent to "switcher" or "multifinder".
When you boot up A/UX, you get a "terminal emulator" on your screen.
This is just like the terminal emulator you get on a Sun before you
bring up the window system -- it looks like an ANSI terminal, with 35
lines and 89 columns, like a slightly bigger VT100. However, they have
cleverly painted a mac-looking box around the outside of the terminal
emulator. There's a menu bar at the top -- with all the words in
grey. You can't hit any of them. There's a box around the terminal
"window", with a title bar. You can't hit it. There isn't even a
mouse cursor. This is a cute trick, but that's all it is. It doesn't
do any kind of graphics, it's just a terminal.
So you say you want windows! Well, Apple has provided them. The
single Toolbox application, term, that comes with your A/UX port
provides multiple windows. However, this is just more VT100's on your
screen. You can have up to 4 ANSI terminal emulators in a variety of
sizes. They can even overlap. (They have to, unless you bought a
third party large monitor, or you like dinky VT100s.) There is no
graphics support, however, and you can't run any Mac applications
because you are already running a Toolbox program and you can only run
one at a time. I would not call this a window system, certainly not in
the sense of NeWS or X or SunView or Andrew or the Apollo window
system. It's more like "uw". Also, "term" is not a supported part of
A/UX. If you find bugs in it, it's your problem.
Don't burn up a lot of money buying color graphics boards for your
Mac-II yet; A/UX doesn't support them. If your color board supports
monochrome, A/UX can use it -- until you try a Toolbox application. It
seems that frame buffer manufacturers have to alter the configuration
ROMs on their boards before A/UX can put up a mouse cursor. Of course,
if your color board does not support a 1-bit mode, A/UX can't use it at
all. And it can only handle one screen right now, even if you have
several. They have promised to fix this Real Soon Now.
The Apple marketing effort here is a masterpiece of hype. I have the
brochure they distributed at UniForum. The outer folder ("There are
currently more than 50 types of UNIX in the world.") has four pictures
of Mac screens. Three of them are running MacOS applications (one from
MultiFinder; the others we can't tell), and are photographed from
straight above the Mac, so you can barely see the screen. The fourth
is running unavailable software from Brown University that brings up
pictures and text from British novels, using the Toolbox. (By the way,
they are calling the Brown stuff "hypertext" and taking Ted Nelson's
name in vain. It ain't hypertext, it's just hype.)
Contained in the folder is a short letter and three flyers. The "Apple
A/UX Operating System" flyer has a single large picture: the Brown U.
software again (which is, of course, *not* in A/UX and not commercially
available either). The "Macintosh II Personal Computer" flyer, for
once, is free of hype. The "A/UX Support Services" flyer is headed by
a big picture of a mailing envelope with an "A/UX Update" tape hanging
out of it. Of course, this tape is in the 40MB Apple SCSI tape format,
which is not supported by A/UX.
In their booth, Apple was demonstrating a version of X windows.
However, if pressed, they revealed that it was X.10, not X.11, that it
was not available for purchase, and would never be available; and that
they could not talk about possible release dates for X.11.
I'd hate to be totally negative in this article, so let me just say
that there *is* a window system for A/UX. You just can't buy it from
Apple. We sell it; it's called MacNews, and it's a straight port of
Sun's NeWS, with all of NeWS's problems and all of NeWS's virtues. The
first test copy went out last night, and it has a firm release date and
a firm price.
I'm a techie through and through and I hate to see people get away with
marketing bullshit. If you buy A/UX, buy it because you know what you are
getting, not because you believed an Apple snow job.
Brain in Neutral
> Remember - it is a Mac. Under A/UX or the Mac OS, you have the Toolbox
> and the Mac look and feel. Ain't nobody else got that ...
Which is hardly to demonstrate that it would be impossible or difficult
to put the Mac look and feel up under some other windowing system.
It's just that, if you do, Apple's lawyers will be on your doorstep.
Which has nothing to do with the superiority of A/UX or the Mac OS.
It is hardly valid to say that system ABC can do something no other
system can do, when the reason is that you'll sue anybody else who
builds a system that can do what ABC does.
---
Paul DuBois UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,uunet}!uwvax!rhesus!dubois |
ARPA: dub...@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu --+--
|
"Live by the sword, die by the sword." |
s/the sword/promiscuity/g
Charles L Ditzel
> This claim requires some looking behind the hype.
> that brings up pictures and text from British novels, using the Toolbox.
> (By the way,
> they are calling the Brown stuff "hypertext" and taking Ted Nelson's
> name in vain. It ain't hypertext, it's just hype.)
Apple shouldn't have to resort to all the stuff you mention..
A friend of mine listened to an interview with Ted Nelson on a local
radio station, apparently Mr. Nelson seemed more enamored with Sun than
the Mac. She said he criticized MacOS as having "design flaws". Maybe
Apple doesn't pay homage to those that pay no homage to Apple.
> I'd hate to be totally negative in this article, so let me just say
> that there *is* a window system for A/UX. You just can't buy it from
> Apple. We sell it; it's called MacNews, and it's a straight port of
> Sun's NeWS, with all of NeWS's problems and all of NeWS's virtues. The
> first test copy went out last night, and it has a firm release date and
> a firm price.
If you have been following the NeWS/X debate in comp.sys.windows recently
then you are aware that a number of responses dealing with actual hands on
NeWS experience haveing been extremely positive. One in particular recounted
that his only previous window/graphics experience was with the Mac Toolbox-
he stated he would take NeWS *any day*. Another recounted that two
experienced C programmers undertook X and NeWS efforts . The X fellow
switched to NeWS after the project was over. NeWS on the Mac is good
news (no pun intended) for Apple.
It should be noted that this is all contrary to Mr Jean Louis-Gassee naive
sense of economics (Mr. Gassee is a proponent of retaining - not licensing -
technology ...).
Apple has turned to Unix - an OS which they do NOT own and are now able to
take advantage of windowing systems (NeWS/X) which they do NOT own, networking
systems (NFS/yellowpages) they do NOT own...Ethernet a technology they do NOT
own. Gassee has gone out of his way lately to pronounce on the gullible
that licensing technology is bad and proprietary technology is good. However,
one need only look at what Apple *does* to understand the limitations of his
views.
Let's face it licensing technology is something that enriches *all* of us.
Sun has allowed others to license (and Apple is using much of this
technology NOW) :
* NeWS (which is now on the Apple - thanks to Grasshopper),
* NFS/Yellowpages (which is how Apple will do their ethernet
networking,
* SunOS SVID Unix which they are licensing and will
deliver to AT&T (and which Apple will eventually license :)
* 7-10 MIP SPARC processor (who knows maybe their is a SPARC
in Apple's future. It would make sense they would be
binary compatible with Sun and AT&T...I think not tho' given
their recent alliance with DEC )
No amount of paranoia about Sun licensing it's products to American and
Japanese vendors can deny the simple fact that a product like NeWS is
good for the Mac consumer...
> If you buy A/UX, buy it because you know what you are
> getting, not because you believed an Apple snow job.
good point. their seems to be to much of it going around these days by
all these computer companies. Some of it borders on outright deliberate
deception.
Incidentally two articles Mac II/ A/UX users might be interested in :
*Unix World has a bunch of articles on A/UX
*Feb. '88 MacWorld page 17 - Sushi, American Style
--------------------------------------------
My thoughts are my own. No one else would have them.
Michael Lonetto
PS: Doesn't anyone but me think that Word 3.01 is *still* flaky? My
favourite is its occasional tendency to crash if you customize the
menus - you then can't start Word until you delete its settings file
from your system folder. Don't tell me it works for you - *most* of
its bugs are non-deterministic. I think they clear random bits in
their idle routine just to keep the users hopping :-) (or is that
hoping? hyping? ...)
Radford Neal
I have noticed that almost everytime something goes wrong under multifinder
one of two programs has been, or is, running:
Microsoft Word 3.01
or
NCSA Telnet 2.1
The combination is especially deadly. These two are especially sneaky in that
they hardly ever crash while running, but lead to cursor freezing and other odd
behavior in otherwise well behaved programs. The worst example is:
Run Telnet for a while, log out, quit Telnet, start Word, do a few things,
freeze up.
No fun at all. I can hardly wait till things start REALLY working under
Multifinder.
--
Michael Lonetto UUCP:(allegra!phri!lonetto)
Dept of Applied Genetics
Public Health Research Institute, 455 1st Ave, NY, NY 10016
Charles L Ditzel
> ph...@apple.UUCP (Phil Ronzone, A/UX Technical Manager) wrote:
> > Remember - it is a Mac. Under A/UX or the Mac OS, you have the Toolbox
> > and the Mac look and feel. Ain't nobody else got that ...
sophistication of other systems that incorporate network window management
and extensible window servers. Three years ago this might have been an
appropriate point.
As for the look and feel ... the Mac certainly has made it's contribution
but since it is not licensable and others can't use it... it is being
by-passed by the remainder of the industry...e.g. SunTools, Presentation
Manager, Apollo's DM, etc. Rather it is Apple that is moving more toward
industry standards with NeWS and X sitting on their system. Writing
an A/UX application using the Mac Toolbox specifically precludes the
application migrating elsewhere (which in some cases makes sense, but in
most does not if you are interested in portability).
> Which is hardly to demonstrate that it would be impossible or difficult
> to put the Mac look and feel up under some other windowing system.
it's been done...why else did Apple sue DRI for GEM.
Chuq Von Rospach
> My
> favourite is its occasional tendency to crash if you customize the
> menus - you then can't start Word until you delete its settings file
> from your system folder. Don't tell me it works for you - *most* of
> its bugs are non-deterministic.
I run thousands of words a month through Word 3.01 with heavily customized
menus, and I've never had it crash.
>I have noticed that almost everytime something goes wrong under multifinder
>one of two programs has been, or is, running:
>
>Microsoft Word 3.01
Word 3.01 is not completely Multifinder compatible. It'lll hang up other
programs running in the background (especially nasty when the background
process is Red Ryder doing a download). it won't deal with the Multifinder
icon on the menubar properly. But I've yet to crash it. Are you running it
in the insanely small memory partition the SIZE resource gives it? Try
putting it in a 640K or larger partition and I'll bet your Word problems go
away.
The first serious word processor that is MultiFinder compatible will get my
business. I can't afford a program that doesn't cooperate..... The only
question is whether it'll be Word 4.0 or FullWrite....
Chuq Von Rospach ch...@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977
Paul Nevai
My Word 3.01 almost always crashes when (i) saving user dictionaries and
(ii) saving glossaries. Otherwise it's OK.
Paul Nevai N41...@univscvm.BITNET (PREFERRED)
Carolina Research Professor ...\!usceast\!pgn.UUCP
Department of Mathematics p...@cs.scarolina.edu.CSNET
University of South Carolina 73057,172.Compu$erve
Columbia, S.C. 29208 1-(803)-777-3776.office
U.S.A. 1-(803)-777-4226.secy
Larry Rosenstein
>
>A Mac II (probably a vanilla Mac as well) can have circular windows - I
>also saw it at DEXPO yesterday (yea, a round clock on the Mac Desktop - neat!).
That's was my little program called TimeKeeper. I believe I sent it to
Info-Mac and/or comp.binaries.mac, but I haven't seen it show up as of yet.
(I have also uploaded it to some local BBS's.)
Any Mac can have windows of any shape. The shape is simply defind by an
apprpriate region. The circular window that TimeKeeper uses is implemented
with a resource that can be copied and pasted into any application that
wants circular windows.
--
Larry Rosenstein, Object Specialist
Apple Computer, Inc. 20525 Mariani Ave, MS 32E Cupertino, CA 95014
AppleLink:Rosenstein1 domain:l...@Apple.COM
UUCP:{sun,voder,nsc,decwrl}!apple!lsr
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>It should be noted that this is all contrary to Mr Jean Louis-Gassee naive
>sense of economics (Mr. Gassee is a proponent of retaining - not licensing -
>technology ...).
>Apple has turned to Unix - an OS which they do NOT own and are now able to
>take advantage of windowing systems (NeWS/X) which they do NOT own, networking
>systems (NFS/yellowpages) they do NOT own...Ethernet a technology they do NOT
>that licensing technology is bad and proprietary technology is good. However,
>one need only look at what Apple *does* to understand the limitations of his
>views.
I'm glad someone brought this up. Mr. Gassee is a very convincing speaker,
and when he says that the only way we can stay ahead of Japan, Inc. is to
use proprietary technology and create our own standards, it sounds right.
But licensing technology isn't always bad (the example of RCA licensing
television technology and then losing to the Japanese). Look at VCRs. JVC
is happy to let any American firm use their technology and we're still getting
blown out. Sony is too (since their proprietary Beta technology just
officially flopped). And at some point standards are necessary. Apple has
a superior user-interface; but the graphics engine behind it (QuickDraw) isn't
worth extending too much longer. PostScript is better (even Apple had to
admit it when they put in the original LaserWriters), and it's where the
world is headed. By licensing much of their technology, Sun has single-
handedly changed the direction of Unix (from System V back to Berkeley/SunOS).
If Apple really wants to change the future of computing, they'd better do the
same.
Bruce G. Barnett
|sophistication of other systems that incorporate network window management
|and extensible window servers. Three years ago this might have been an
|appropriate point.
My naive impression of the Mac Windows was that is was a useful window
system given a single process and a small screen. But I don't
understand how Apple can provide the same interface in a multi
application environment. How would pull-down menus work with multiple
applications? They can't all grab the top of the screen.
Context-sensitive pop-up menus make much more sense to me. But then
you would need more than one button on the mouse.
Someone once made the point that it is easy to grow downward than to
grow upward. That is, it is easier to convert a multi-application,
multi-tasking, color window system into a single color, single user
system than vice versa.
I bet Apple is finding out that converting the Mac toolbox to Unix
is more complicated than they thought.
| Rather it is Apple that is moving more toward
|industry standards with NeWS and X sitting on their system.
Moving? I think "dragged kicking and screaming" is more appropriate :-)
NeWS for the Mac II is looking better and better. Too bad that
NeWS wouldn't be practical for a non-A/UX system.
--
Bruce G. Barnett <bar...@ge-crd.ARPA> <bar...@steinmetz.UUCP>
uunet!steinmetz!barnett
Clayton Elwell
I bet Apple is finding out that converting the Mac toolbox to Unix
is more complicated than they thought.
Well, Phil Ronzone is entitled to the funny war stories on this one,
but from what he said to me when I picked up our seed EtherTalk card
last year, it was somewhat the other way--everyone was surprised at
just how well it *did* work. (A/UX groupie trivia question here--what
was the first program to use use the toolbox under A/UX?)
As far as I am concerned, I'm willing to bet that now that A/UX and
Multifinder are now actually out the door, the A/UX folks and the Mac
OS folks will finally sit down and get the Printing Manager and the
Layer Manager working across the board. It sure would be nice to have
something that looked like Multifinder on top and A/UX on the bottom.
NeWS has a very high niftitude, but I would love to see the Apple
Desktop Interface on top of it. The demo user interface that comes
with NeWS is better than X, but it's still a hack.
What version of X are we up to now? 11? I'm willing to give Apple
one or two more on the A/UX toolbox...
--
Clayton M. Elwell / elw...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lawrence A. Dziegielewski
> In article <2...@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu>, b...@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes:
>> ph...@apple.UUCP (Phil Ronzone, A/UX Technical Manager) wrote:
>> > Remember - it is a Mac. Under A/UX or the Mac OS, you have the Toolbox
>> > and the Mac look and feel. Ain't nobody else got that ...
>
> The toolbox is hardly something to be touting ... the Mac Toolbox lacks the
> sophistication of other systems that incorporate network window management
> and extensible window servers. Three years ago this might have been an
> appropriate point.
Nothng to be touting, eh? The Mac Toolbox and the Mac user interface has
set the standard for other PC's to follow for three years now. Sure, it's
not network extensible, but it wasn't designed to be either. It *is* THE
most consistant user interface on any computer today, and always will be.
On no other computer can you find the same commands in the same place on
hundreds of different applications.
It never ceases to amaze me that the majority of people who malign the Mac
are the same people who have never used one.
> As for the look and feel ... the Mac certainly has made it's contribution
> but since it is not licensable and others can't use it... it is being
> by-passed by the remainder of the industry...e.g. SunTools, Presentation
> Manager, Apollo's DM, etc. Rather it is Apple that is moving more toward
How can you say that the look and feel are being bypassed when nearly every
windowing system has either 'borrowed from' or flat out copied the Mac user
interface. There's MS Windows, GEM, and countless others who are riding
the coat tails of Apple foresight.
> industry standards with NeWS and X sitting on their system. Writing
> an A/UX application using the Mac Toolbox specifically precludes the
> application migrating elsewhere (which in some cases makes sense, but in
> most does not if you are interested in portability).
Says who? I'm an Apple developer writing applications for the Mac under
A/UX. My applications are being written so that they are not only portable
to the MacOS, (that's Finder to you), but to vanilla UNIX. too Stuff that in
your 3 button mouse.
And why shouldn't Apple have NeWS and X on their system? Why should that
bother you? Apple has recognized the need to run standard windowng systems
in addition to the Finder. I feel that will increase the number of
applications that will be ported to the Mac II.
> it's been done...why else did Apple sue DRI for GEM.
Apple sued DRI for blatantly ripping off the Mac user interface, something
it has the right to do. As I have said before, others have borrowed
heavily from the Mac OS. And as I recall, didn't Apple grant Microsoft a
license to the Apple look and feel for Windows?
"All in all, I'd rather use a Macintosh"
- W.C. Fields (paraphrased)
--
Lawrence A. Dziegielewski | E.I. Dupont Co.
uunet!eplrx7!lad | Engineering Physics Lab
Cash-We-Serve 76127,104 | Wilmington, Delaware 19898
MABELL: (302) 695-1311 | Mail Stop: E357-318
Byron Han, fire fighter
>In article <17...@ssc-vax.UUCP> ben...@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:
>|The toolbox is hardly something to be touting ...
>
>system given a single process and a small screen. But I don't
>understand how Apple can provide the same interface in a multi
>application environment. How would pull-down menus work with multiple
>applications? They can't all grab the top of the screen.
>Context-sensitive pop-up menus make much more sense to me. But then
>you would need more than one button on the mouse.
Why don't you try out MultiFinder and see how well (in my unbiased :-) opinion)
it works? The menu bar reflects the menu appropriate to the topmost
application. All the windows that belong to an application reside in a
layer. When an application is brought to the front/foreground, all the windows
in its layer are brought forward and the menu bar is switched.
> Someone once made the point that it is easy to grow downward than to
> grow upward. That is, it is easier to convert a multi-application,
> multi-tasking, color window system into a single color, single user
> system than vice versa.
Incidentally, the Macintosh windowing user interface evolved from the Lisa
Office System which was a multitasking multiple window, multiple application
environment. I don't think that there is much difference between a
color and a monochrome windowing system.
Disclaimer:
This is NOT an official Apple position, just some comments by me.
I do work for Apple and happen to love it so take my comments with
a grain of NaCl.
--
------------------------ Byron Han, Communications Tool ----------------------
Apple Computer, Inc. 20525 Mariani Ave, MS 27Y Cupertino, CA 95014
ATTnet:408-973-6450 applelink:HAN1 domain:h...@apple.COM MacNET:HAN
GENIE:BYRONHAN COMPUSERVE:72167,1664 UUCP:{sun,voder,nsc,decwrl}!apple!han
tuc...@ccvaxa.uucp
> * 7-10 MIP SPARC processor (who knows maybe their is a SPARC
> in Apple's future. It would make sense they would be
> binary compatible with Sun and AT&T...I think not tho' given
> their recent alliance with DEC )
Apple already has a good processor (the 68020). Right now SUN
and AT&T are defining the portable binary platforms. The SPARC
chip was the first one. Both AT&T and SUN have said that the
68030 and 80386 will also be added to the list of standard binary
bases.
Tim Tucker
tuc...@xenurus.Gould.COM
Ali Ozer
>My naive impression of the Mac Windows was that is was a useful window
>system given a single process and a small screen. But I don't
>understand how Apple can provide the same interface in a multi
>application environment. How would pull-down menus work with multiple
>applications? They can't all grab the top of the screen.
They provide the same sort of interface the Amiga's provided since the
beginning --- The menu bar shows the menu options of the application which
is active. You just click on another window, and the menu options belonging
to the application that owns that window appear in the menu bar.
An Amiga feature which I'm sure Mac owners would love to see on their
machine is the ability for tasks to open up their own screens.
Thus a task requiring 2 colors can open up a single-bit plane
screen while a task requiring 4096 colors can open up another --- They both
exist in their own screens, which the user can drag up and down and depth
arrange. (Of course, each screen can have its own set of windows, and its
own set of menus --- after all, each screen has its own menu bar!)
This reduces the clutter of having too many windows on the desktop.
What happens on the Mac II when a task wants 8 bit
planes --- Does the whole desktop change into 8-bit plane mode?
Ali Ozer, a...@polya.stanford.edu
Larry Rosenstein
>is running unavailable software from Brown University that brings up
>pictures and text from British novels, using the Toolbox. (By the way,
>they are calling the Brown stuff "hypertext" and taking Ted Nelson's
>name in vain. It ain't hypertext, it's just hype.)
The name of the system is Intermedia, and it has been described in several
papers. I would like to know why you say that Intermedia is not hypertext.
(The only thing I can think of is that Intermedia deals with graphics as
well as text, and might better be described as hypermedia.)
Larry Rosenstein
>application environment. How would pull-down menus work with multiple
>applications? They can't all grab the top of the screen.
>Context-sensitive pop-up menus make much more sense to me. But then
>you would need more than one button on the mouse.
One can switch the menu bar, as is done in MultiFinder. One could have
application-specific menus in a bar within the window (as is done in
Microsoft Windows). One can have a moveable menu bar, or menus that can be
torn off and positioned on the screen (as in HyperCard). One can work
around the single mouse button by making a mouse sensitive area that
brings up the menus.
>Someone once made the point that it is easy to grow downward than to
>grow upward. That is, it is easier to convert a multi-application,
>multi-tasking, color window system into a single color, single user
>system than vice versa.
I don't think one direction is easier than another. If you design for the
more powerful environment you probably will take advantage of features that
aren't available in the other environment.
>I bet Apple is finding out that converting the Mac toolbox to Unix
>is more complicated than they thought.
The difficulty (as I understand it -- I'm not associated with the A/UX
project) is getting the exact same code, which is in ROM, and was written
for the Mac O/S, to run under A/UX.
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>system given a single process and a small screen. But I don't
>understand how Apple can provide the same interface in a multi
>application environment. How would pull-down menus work with multiple
>applications? They can't all grab the top of the screen.
>Context-sensitive pop-up menus make much more sense to me. But then
>you would need more than one button on the mouse.
I don't know. Having used 1, 2, and 3 buttons, I find I like 1 button
most of all (even though on the Mac we have to remember to hold down
certain modifier keys at various times). And as to menus for multiple
applications, I really dislike the MS-Windows/Presentation Manager
approach of putting the menus in the window themselves -- who wants to
see all those menus all the time? Likewise, the popup approach, where
you don't see *any* menus until you press a mouse button. I like the
Multifinder approach, where although there may be many different
applications on the screen (each in their own windows), only one
application has control of the menu bar. That way I always know what
menus are available, but when I'm in Versaterm (like I am now), I
don't see the Finder's menus.
On the other hand, what do multi-button, popup menu people think about
the new tear-off menus in Hypercard (I like them)?
Bob Sutterfield
>Apple sued DRI for blatantly ripping off the Mac user interface,
>something it has the right to do.
Nobody has yet been able to explain to me why Xerox didn't sue Aple
for "blatantly ripping off" the UI features developed, or at least
solidified, during PARC's glory days. You know the ones: pull-down
menus, icons, and such-like stuff. I know that stuff wasn't unique to
Xerox; but apparently Jobs got inspired for The Look And Feel while
taking a tour of PARC, and they do look awfully darned similar.
It seems awfully strange that Apple borrows PARC's work, then gets
uptight enough to sue when DRI borrows Apple's instantiation of PARC's
work.
--
Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
b...@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!bob
Charles L Ditzel
> NeWS for the Mac II is looking better and better. Too bad that
> NeWS wouldn't be practical for a non-A/UX system.
Actually, funny you mention that, my latest MacWeek sez that the :
Grasshopper Group of SF is unveiling and A/UX version of
NeWS.
and
Wedge Computers Inc, of Waltham, Mass. is completing a
MacOS version of NeWS.
and
eXP Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. is also doing NeWS ports.
Charles L Ditzel
> NeWS has a very high niftitude, but I would love to see the Apple
> Desktop Interface on top of it. The demo user interface that comes
> with NeWS is better than X, but it's still a hack.
Their is no technical reason that I know of, why the Apple
desktop interface couldn't sit on top of NeWS.
Charles L Ditzel
> Why don't you try out MultiFinder and see how well (in my unbiased :-) opinion)
> it works? The menu bar reflects the menu appropriate to the topmost
> application. All the windows that belong to an application reside in a
> layer. When an application is brought to the front/foreground, all the windows
> in its layer are brought forward and the menu bar is switched.
at the top (i do this on a sun, usually two editting sessions) maybe
different editors side by side...? Your menu bar would be constantly
changing as you go back and forth (cutting and pasting)... (all that
wasted mouse travel time and a wasted mouse click )
I think context-sensitive menus make more sense (try SunView applications
and see how well they work) :-) (Seriously, I think a menu bar starts
making less sense in a multitasking environment were more than one
application is running at a time in a number of different windows )
Doug Landauer
> windowing system has either 'borrowed from' or flat out copied the Mac user
> interface.
No, most modern window systems borrowed from work done at Xerox PARC,
just like Apple did for most of the features of the Mac's user
interface.
> > why else did Apple sue DRI for GEM.
> Apple sued DRI for blatantly ripping off the Mac user interface
OK, folks, it's time once again to correct this misinformation. Apple
never sued DRI. Apple only threatened to sue, and DRI, which was
having financial trouble due to several years of marketing mistakes,
prudently chose to change GEM to alter the behavior of the features
that Apple's lawyers felt that Apple owned.
I believe that the primary Macintosh user-interface feature that Apple
felt the legal right to object to in GEM was the top-of-the-screen
pull-down menus, which are appropriate only to the tiny screen that the
original Mac was saddled with (and to the IBM-PC's CGA). Xerox PARC
had used pop-up menus, which are much better suited to the larger
screen sizes now (finally!) becoming common. This is one reason why
Sun never felt any similar heat from Apple.
Not coincidentally, that feature is one of the ones being bypassed by
window systems designed for larger screens.
-
Doug Landauer Sun Microsystems, Inc.
ARPA Internet: land...@sun.com Software Products Division
UUCP: ...!sun!landauer
Bruce G. Barnett
| I bet Apple is finding out that converting the Mac toolbox to Unix
| is more complicated than they thought.
In article <74...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
elw...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Clayton Elwell) writes:
|[...] it was somewhat the other way--everyone was surprised at
|just how well it *did* work.
I didn't mean emulating a single application using A/UX, but
extending the user interface to handle multiple applications
simultaneously. I want to use several Mac applications simultaneously.
I have trouble visualizing the bar along the top and the functions in
a multi-application environment. Every application needs it's own
bar. But the standard Mac interface would put them all in the same
place. Someone suggested to me that the window/application on the top
would 'own' the top bar. But you would have to keep changing which
application is on top of which to use the functions provided by a bar.
In this case, a pop-up menu would be much more convenient.
Less mouse travel on a large screen. No change in the window overlapping.
Window systems that force the active window to be on top on the stack
are a real pain.
Just an opinion, of course.
Charles L Ditzel
> From article <17...@ssc-vax.UUCP>, by ben...@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel):
> set the standard for other PC's to follow for three years now. Sure, it's
> not network extensible, but it wasn't designed to be either. It *is* THE
> most consistant user interface on any computer today, and always will be.
> On no other computer can you find the same commands in the same place on
> hundreds of different applications.
but it is the heighth of hubris to believe that some applications would
not operate better without this interface...so before getting excited ...
I would hope you would see that in *fact* with each new addition of a feature
the Mac look and feel is *changing*. Hypercard's "home" for example is hardly
in keeping with the "look and feel" you talk about...what will multi-tasking
do to it? The Mac is evolving ... and hopefully to something better.
> It never ceases to amaze me that the majority of people who malign the Mac
> are the same people who have never used one.
talking about someone else. ... incidentally I was not maligning the Mac
at all...I was stating the user interface practices have moved on since the
Mac's introduction . Instead of religious flaming why not look at what
Apollo, Sun, Xerox and Symbolics are doing. I am familiar with these
machines and they have alot to offer.
> > As for the look and feel ... the Mac certainly has made it's contribution
> > but since it is not licensable and others can't use it... it is being
> > by-passed by the remainder of the industry...e.g. SunTools, Presentation
> > Manager, Apollo's DM, etc. Rather it is Apple that is moving more toward
> How can you say that the look and feel are being bypassed when nearly every
> windowing system has either 'borrowed from' or flat out copied the Mac user
> interface. There's MS Windows, GEM, and countless others who are riding
> the coat tails of Apple foresight.
Funny...I didn't know Apple invented "the menu"(nor "the icon")..and
they did not...GEM certainly did copy Apple (in my opinion)...as for
SunTools and DM not at all. Unless you also think that Apple invented the
"icon"...? :)
SunTool has context-sensitive menus that can be customized by the
user (or they can accept the default). Sun's Windows and user interface
is *completely* customizable (like the control panel but much more
extensive) (one can for example set a visual bell or an a audible bell,
tabs, gravity (where the cursor will appear when a new window is generated),
pull-right menus can be customized (whole trees can be created if you
desire...)...the DM and SunTool environments allow you to for example to cut
and paste the command line arguements (as well as among editors) and these
operations can become object oriented....for example...in DM you can
select the word "file.x" and click the mouse...you then pull up a view or editor
with file.x in it. Incidentally...you seem to think that Apple worked from
a vacuum...you don't mention Xerox or Xerox licenses.
> > industry standards with NeWS and X sitting on their system. Writing
> > an A/UX application using the Mac Toolbox specifically precludes the
> > application migrating elsewhere (which in some cases makes sense, but in
> > most does not if you are interested in portability).
> Says who? I'm an Apple developer writing applications for the Mac under
> A/UX. My applications are being written so that they are not only portable
> to the MacOS, (that's Finder to you), but to vanilla UNIX. too Stuff that
(Obviously you are incensed by what you view as heretical ideas)
good for you ... i don't think too many Unix systems have Mac Toolbox
calls...sorry to break the news ... you make my point quite nicely...you will
not be using the Mac Toolbox on other systems. So what "industry standard"
will you be using NeWS or X? :)
> And why shouldn't Apple have NeWS and X on their system? Why should that
> bother you? Apple has recognized the need to run standard windowng systems
doesn't bother me a bit. tho' It seems to bother you more. Personally, i
think NeWS and X are *good* for the Mac II. My problem is with attitudes that
permeate your posting...if for example NeXT or some other company came out
with a more elegant user interface...i get the feeling you would ignore it.
-----------------
My opinions are my own. Thankfully.
Charles L Ditzel
> On the other hand, what do multi-button, popup menu people think about
> the new tear-off menus in Hypercard (I like them)?
..i had to ask someone...they said..."Some Mac people think floating menus
are new.... to me it's a floating menu...this is a standard part of SunTools
and Apollo Dialog...nothing new at all...
actually a refinement of what you call the tear off menu ... is that you
click inside a window and a menu pops up...tho' if you *only* have one
button on your mouse this might not be practical.
(I must confess I think one button mice are obsolete...the above being just
one reason...i also think mechanical mice are worthless ...On Apollo's and
Sun's it is possible to "program" each mouse button ...so if you want the
first button is "SELECT", second can be "OPEN AN EDIT SESSION" on the file
name i am pointing at, third might be "ICONIFY" (make window into an icon) )
Warren Gish;133B Biochem;x3-9219
>Nobody has yet been able to explain to me why Xerox didn't sue Aple
>for "blatantly ripping off" the UI features developed, or at least
>solidified, during PARC's glory days.
from Xerox/PARC. And I assume the licensing agreement met
with such agreement that law suits weren't suitable.
Warren Gish
IS&T
UC Berkeley
cswa...@violet.berkeley.edu
cswa...@ucbviole.bitnet
Lyman Taylor
In article <17...@ssc-vax.UUCP> ben...@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:
.... ( deleted comments Byron Han made about multifinder )
>Still sounds awfully serial to me. What happens if you have two windows
>at the top (i do this on a sun, usually two editting sessions) maybe
>different editors side by side...? Your menu bar would be constantly
>changing as you go back and forth (cutting and pasting)... (all that
>wasted mouse travel time and a wasted mouse click )
>I think context-sensitive menus make more sense (try SunView applications
>and see how well they work) :-) (Seriously, I think a menu bar starts
>making less sense in a multitasking environment were more than one
>application is running at a time in a number of different windows )
Multitasking saves the World! Come on, the only person I know of
the can actually use two applications at once is Mr. Spock of Star Trek due to
the unique features of his Vulcan mind ( i.e. he is not a human being ).
Unfortunately, us humans can only handle ONE high level cognitive task
at once. Therefore, we only need ONE menu at a time. Anything above that is
a nice HACK, but not all that useful for us mortals. Needless to say, it
ignores most of what about Human Computer Interaction.
[ Like people operate best in a CONSISTANT environment which is why the Mac is
so easy to learn and use. And UNIX is well UNIX ( a terrific puzzle, but not
as great a tool as it could be. And why NeWS and X applications are often
thought of as HACKS by people who did not 1) create, 2) pay for, or
3) forcibly made to use the application in the first place. ]
Think about it. When have you ever seen anyone, including yourself,
doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing
something into your favorite editor ). I give you a hint most computers I seen
have ONE keyboard per user. This applies to general human behavior also. For
example, people can only handle one conversation at a time. Some people can
easily and rapidly " task switch " from conversation to conversation ( doing
something remarkably similiar to a multitasking operating system ) but they
cannot do it in parallel.
This is not to say multitasking is not useful. Multitasking and
timesharing used to mean just about the same thing. Then came the single user
system. It is useful on a single user system to run a BACKGROUND task(s) that
needs NO iteraction with the user, like laser printing a 50 page document. The
important point is that menus and the mouse and all that WIMPy stuff are for
INTERACTION with the human. WIMPy stuff is used by the human to directly
controlthe program unlike the MS/DOS and UNIX environments with their prompts,
with which the program ask YOU the questions. The psychological types call this
User Directed Software. Humans do not need to control background tasks that
is why they are background tasks. If programs need to talk to other programs
THEY don't need the menu for hopefully they know what each are talking about
:-).
As for your example of having two editors going at once.
1) If this was two copies the SAME editor open on two different files
then I would same that this is a malfunction of the EDITOR.
Take a look at most Mac word processors; they have the
capability of having multiple windows open at once.
Even emacs has multiple buffers ( it user interface leaves
something to be desired though )
2) If you actually needed two DIFFERENT editors you hopefully were
looking at two DIFFERENT types of files. In this case you are
context switching between two different types of data who
hopefully have completely different menus. ( execpt for
the APPLE, FILE, and EDIT menus, there goes that CONSISANTCY
again, Mac Write and Mac Paint have for the most part different
menus and operation ( those probably aren't the best examples
but you get the idea :-).
To sum it all up multitasking means that can have more that one task
runnig at the same time ( more than one doing work FOR you ), but you can only
work WITH one application at a time. So it looks SERIAL because people THINK
serial. We can only do low level tasks like see, hear, taste, and smell in
parallel; I guess that's what separates the humans from the computers who think
SERIALLY just like we do, only they're better at faking it.
P.S. Apple I hope you keep this in mind while you are rewriting the MAC OS. We
need enhanced MultiF not UNIX. We already got UNIX. :-)
P.P.S. And yes the Mac interface isn't THE absolute best interface, but at
least its tries.
Lyman S. Taylor ly...@ames-aurora.arpa
NASA Ames Research Center or
more verbose
...{uunet,hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!lyman
Michael J. Schmelzer
In article <75...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, b...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
>Nobody has yet been able to explain to me why Xerox didn't sue Aple
>for "blatantly ripping off" the UI features developed, or at least
>solidified, during PARC's glory days. You know the ones: pull-down
but I believe that Xerox owns at least 2% of Apple, with an option
on an even greater interest.
==============================================================================
comes around Mike Schmelzer MJSC...@PUCC.Princeton.Edu what goes around
==============================================================================
Ken Lee
>
> Multitasking saves the World! Come on, the only person I know of
>the can actually use two applications at once is Mr. Spock of Star Trek due to
>the unique features of his Vulcan mind ( i.e. he is not a human being ).
>
> Unfortunately, us humans can only handle ONE high level cognitive task
>at once. Therefore, we only need ONE menu at a time. Anything above that is
>a nice HACK, but not all that useful for us mortals. Needless to say, it
>ignores most of what about Human Computer Interaction.
>
require support from more than 1 application program. For example, I
regularly debug programs with 3 windows open: an editor, a debugger,
and the running program. Even if you had 1 application supporting these
3 things, you'd still need 3 sub-windows to display them all.
Many advanced user interfaces are similar. There's often one spatial
display window (e.g., a map or image or a spreadsheet), one abstract display
window (e.g., some statistical analysis graphs, etc.), and one control panel
window. That's 3 windows even for a narrow (but sophisticated) application.
I'd hate to see someone fly a plane (or even drive a car) if he could look out
the window or look at his guages, but not both at the same time.
Ken
Doug Landauer
>
> I believe that the primary Macintosh user-interface feature that Apple
> felt the legal right to object to in GEM was the top-of-the-screen
Taken out of the context of the discussion of window systems, this was
a misleading statement. Apple's other legitimate objections were to the
GEM *applications* GEM-Write, GEM-Paint and GEM-Draw, whose looks were
indeed copied identically (well, as well as you could do on an IBM-PC)
from the corresponding Mac applications.
--
Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer
<
<at once.
<example, people can only handle one conversation at a time. Some people can
<easily and rapidly " task switch " from conversation to conversation ( doing
<something remarkably similiar to a multitasking operating system ) but they
<cannot do it in parallel.
Uh, could you make up your mind? Switching between one task and
another _defines_ multitasking. So your friends who can switch
conversations _can_ multitask. Doing it in a windowed computing
environment is even easier. Even as I type, I'm watching the output
from a compile, checking for error messages. The other tasks I'm
running now are either display updates (clock), or daemons that do
things for me when certain conditions are met. Am I "using" those
applications? I think so - it's just that they cause to happen
subconsciously things that I'd otherwise have to consciously do.
<Therefore, we only need ONE menu at a time. Anything above that is
<a nice HACK, but not all that useful for us mortals. Needless to say, it
<ignores most of what about Human Computer Interaction.
This is different from the statement that you can only do one thing at
a time. Obviously, you can only use as many menus as there are
pointing devices on the system. Give me two mice on some workstations,
and I can probably use two menus simultaneously.
One the other hand, the "one" menu means it's probably tied down to a
specific place, so you have to go there to use the menu. This makes it
_hard_ to let muscle memory make menu selections for you. That's an
important thing to miss.
<mike
--
[Our regularly scheduled .signature preempted.] Mike Meyer
The Amiga 1000: Let's build _the_ hackers machine. m...@berkeley.edu
The Amiga 500: Let's build one as cheaply as possible! ucbvax!mwm
The Amiga 2000: Let's build one inside an IBM PC! m...@ucbjade.BITNET
Peter da Silva
to the Mac's popularity (due, in turn, to being the first kid on the block
with affordable windows) *everyone* has been copying those stupid menus.
Atari even emulates Apple's one-button paradigm on their 2-button mouse.
Amiga at least has a separate menu button. But I still have to drag the mouse
halfway across the screen to get at the menus when I hit it. I'd MUCH rather
have context-sensitive pop-up menus. But, nooooo. Apple came up with pull-down
menus and that's the way it'll be. The CP/M-style-system-calls of the windowing
world.
And what happened to the "drag a document into a processor" metaphor? Apple
came up with something that looked like the Xerox Star, but it sure as hell
doesn't work like it.
--
-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva `-_-'
-- normally ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter U
-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.
Dick St.Peters
>doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing
>something into your favorite editor ). I give you a hint most computers I seen
>have ONE keyboard per user. This applies to general human behavior also. For
>example, people can only handle one conversation at a time. Some people can
>easily and rapidly " task switch " from conversation to conversation ( doing
>something remarkably similiar to a multitasking operating system ) but they
>cannot do it in parallel.
I *routinely* do things in parallel in different windows. At its most
extreme, this means using several windows on my Sun to watch debugging
output from rlogin sessions running communicating network peers on
other hosts. Without these windows, I'd have to debug my distributed
application off-line, losing the time-relationship between events.
I also frequently fixing source-code errors while the compiler in
another window is spitting out its error messages.
These are extreme examples, but I'm virtually always doing things that
I consider multi-tasking, meaning things that I could not do without a
multi-tasking system - and a simultaneous-display window system.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY
stpe...@ge-crd.arpa
uunet!steinmetz!stpeters
John Gregor
>How can you say that the look and feel are being bypassed when nearly every
>windowing system has either 'borrowed from' or flat out copied the Mac user
>interface. There's MS Windows, GEM, and countless others who are riding
>the coat tails of Apple foresight.
Ummmm, excuse me, but wasn't a lot of that "Apple foresight" work that
was pioneered by Xerox PARC about half a decade earlier?
I think the "Apple foresight" you mean is that they had the foresight to
'borrow from' or flat out copy PARC's work before DRI.
--
pqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpq
bdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbd
John Gregor johng%ecrcva...@germany.CSNET
Bruce Barnett
Especially when we have people on the net whom have only used
one interface proficiently.
I am not saying that what you do is WRONG, but merely what *I* like.
It is very hard to visualize a sophisicated user interface
from these articles. So bear with me.
In article <3...@esquire.UUCP> s...@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) writes:
|I don't know. Having used 1, 2, and 3 buttons, I find I like 1 button
|most of all
First of all - did you have a DECENT 3-button window system, and did
you learn how to use it effectively?
Saying a one-button system is better that all three button systems is
silly, because a flexible window system can allow you to emulate a
one-button system. And if you want to take a pair of pliers to your
three button mouse to perform a button-ectomy - fine! :-)
But three button systems, with a flexible window system,
have - to me - several advantages.
For instance - I like the ability to move, resize, hide, expose, open
or close a window by grabbing the window anywhere along the edge and
hitting the proper combination of keys and buttons.
Don't some window systems do a window resize by grabbing a special
(fixed) part of the frame? And moving a window is another spot on the
frame? And of course that part of the frame must be exposed.
Maybe you like this. Hokay. But I would be frustrated because
if I want to move and resize a window, I can't do both using any
corner that's exposed. I have to
expose the proper spot
move the mouse to that corner ( say lower right).
perform the resize ( assume the upper left corner stays fixed).
move the mouse to another corner
perform the move
put the window back to the proper top-to-bottom position..
Given a flexible window system what I would like to do to make the
same window larger - but leave the (say) lower right corner fixed, is
to :
Move mouse to upper left corner and press the proper buttons.
move the mouse to the proper position and let go of the buttons.
I would think that pull-down menus would also slow me down.
Why move the mouse up to the top when all of my choices could
be known by leaving the mouse in the same spot and pressing the button
that gives you the pop-up menus?
And I would bind the other buttons on the mouse to act as
accelerators, so I wouldn't have to use the pop-up menus except for
rare occassions.
|On the other hand, what do multi-button, popup menu people think about
|the new tear-off menus in Hypercard (I like them)?
What are tear-off menus?
manic pop thrill
>In article <2...@eos.UUCP> ly...@eos.UUCP (Lyman Taylor) writes:
>> Think about it. When have you ever seen anyone, including yourself,
>>doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing
>>something into your favorite editor ). I give you a hint most computers I seen
>
>extreme, this means using several windows on my Sun to watch debugging
>output from rlogin sessions running communicating network peers on
i cannot speak for the original poster, but what i think he was trying
to say was that at any one time you (the human) would not be typing
into two editors at once, or would not be filling in two dialog boxes
at once, or would not be typing a spreadsheet command at exactly the
same time you are typing text into an editor. you can be running a
number of programs simultaneously, but at any one time you are
interacting (using the mouse, keyboard, lightpen, etc) with at most
one. although there may be other windows on the screen where
computation is going on, or data is being printed, there is only one
window that the user is interacting with directly.
dsc
dsc
`true love is the devil's wishbone'
Ray Hill
>the can actually use two applications at once is Mr. Spock of Star Trek due to
>the unique features of his Vulcan mind ( i.e. he is not a human being ).
Then I guess I must have pointed ears. Having multiple applications on the
screen at one time is my prefered mode of operation. Using multiple Xterms
with the X Window system, I have multiple "vi" editing windows of the code I
am currently working on. I also keep one window one for the compile/link of
my application. This way I can edit a file while keeping an eye on the compile
window for errors. I also like to open a "rn" window while compiling. This
way I only read articles while waiting for the compile to finish. If at any
second the compile finishes or bombs I see the exact error on my screen.
> Unfortunately, us humans can only handle ONE high level cognitive task
>at once.
See the above note.
> Think about it. When have you ever seen anyone, including yourself,
>doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing
>something into your favorite editor ). I give you a hint most computers I seen
>have ONE keyboard per user.
Again see the above note. Also even though only one keyboard is attached to a
screen. That doesn't mean you can't do data entry into several windows. You
see I am faster at changing code than the computer is at compiling. So I can
actually get ahead.
> To sum it all up multitasking means that can have more that one task
>runnig at the same time ( more than one doing work FOR you ), but you can only
>work WITH one application at a time. So it looks SERIAL because people THINK
>serial. We can only do low level tasks like see, hear, taste, and smell in
>parallel; I guess that's what separates the humans from the computers who think
>SERIALLY just like we do, only they're better at faking it.
To sum it up, there are times people can appear to work in parallel to the
computer. Sure its still actually serial but I get better more throughout by
making my computer think I can work in parallel.
>P.P.S. And yes the Mac interface isn't THE absolute best interface, but at
> least its tries.
P.P.S. Any yes the UNIX shell command interface isn't THE absolute best, but
at least it tries.
>
>
>Lyman S. Taylor ly...@ames-aurora.arpa
>NASA Ames Research Center or
Ray Hill
hill@nicmad
Stephen B. Baumgarten
>talking about someone else. ... incidentally I was not maligning the Mac
>at all...I was stating the user interface practices have moved on since the
>Mac's introduction . Instead of religious flaming why not look at what
>Apollo, Sun, Xerox and Symbolics are doing. I am familiar with these
>machines and they have alot to offer.
Actually, the only thing Symbolics is doing these days is laying people off.
At least they're still one step ahead of rival Lisp Machines, a company that
now dearly wishes it had spent more time developing expert systems in
bankruptcy litigation...
[ :-), you know. I just like poking fun at AI every now and then... ]
Charles L Ditzel
# In article <17...@ssc-vax.UUCP> ben...@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:
#
# .... ( deleted comments Byron Han made about multifinder )
#
#
# >Still sounds awfully serial to me. What happens if you have two windows
# >at the top (i do this on a sun, usually two editting sessions) maybe
# >different editors side by side...? Your menu bar would be constantly
# >changing as you go back and forth (cutting and pasting)... (all that
# >wasted mouse travel time and a wasted mouse click )
# >I think context-sensitive menus make more sense (try SunView applications
# >and see how well they work) :-) (Seriously, I think a menu bar starts
# >making less sense in a multitasking environment were more than one
# >application is running at a time in a number of different windows )
#
# Multitasking saves the World! Come on, the only person I know of
Some how you picked up on the multi-tasking aspect rather than the more
important issue of the cumbersomeness (is-this-a-word?) of menu bar switching.
# 2) If you actually needed two DIFFERENT editors you hopefully were
# looking at two DIFFERENT types of files. In this case you are
# context switching between two different types of data who
# hopefully have completely different menus. ( execpt for
# the APPLE, FILE, and EDIT menus, there goes that CONSISANTCY
# again, Mac Write and Mac Paint have for the most part different
# menus and operation ( those probably aren't the best examples
# but you get the idea :-).
Again you missed the *main* point, even if you do not have multitasking.
The user interface you wind up with is one with constant mouse clicks and
constant menu bar switches :( . Further, you will be constantly looking
to see which application window is the active one (a further nuisance).
Finally (if you do have multitasking) It gets worse (as I percieve it) on
an abstract level...when two windows are on top (side by side) why should
you choose one over the other in putting a menu bar up for that one? Can
you really design a system which unnecessarily defines user activity in a
serial manner and *predict* the type of applications you will see in the
future.
You wind up limiting your user interface today and for the future.
roger_wa...@cup.portal.com
Instead of guessing, why not asky the cognitive people?
And they'll tell you that humans pay attention to only one thing at a time.
The example about gauges and flying is inaccurrate; a pilot glances outside,
then to the gauges and then outside again.
Gregory Dow
>If nothing else, Apple has earned a big black mark for pull-down menus. Due
>to the Mac's popularity (due, in turn, to being the first kid on the block
>with affordable windows) *everyone* has been copying those stupid menus.
>Atari even emulates Apple's one-button paradigm on their 2-button mouse.
Pull-down menus are fine on the original, small Mac screen, but can be
a pain with a large and/or mulitple monitor set up. Tear-off menus
(for those who asked, these are menus that you can pull down and then
drag around and place anywhere on the screen) are great, but really
effective only for one or two menus at a time. Having 6 or so menus
floating around at once gets confusing and takes up valuable screen space.
I've been thinking about an extension to the standard Mac interface where
a multiple-button mouse is simulated using modifier keys. I propose that
option-clicking (or control-clicking) should display a hierarchical popup menu
of the titles in the menu bar. For example, in a simple program with just
an Apple, File, and Edit menu, you would get the following:
-------------
| A > |
| File > |
| Edit > |
-------------
This menu would popup next to the mouse location and behave as a normal
hierarchical menu.
What do people think about this idea? If there's interest, I can post
some source code showing how implement this is in an application.
I haven't quite figured out how to implement this as an
INIT or cdev so that it will work with existing executable programs.
Gregory Dow ARPA: elc...@garnet.berkeley.edu
Chemical Engineering Dept. UUCP: {uwvax, decvax, ihnp4, ...}!ucbvax
University of California !elcond%garnet.berkeley.edu
Berkeley, CA 94720 BITNET: POLYDOW@UCBCMSA
Alexander M. Rosenberg
(I can't remember off hand) DA. It doesn't work on a II, as I recall.
Try contacting The Boston Computer Society if you can't find it. (I recall
putting it on a disk quite a while ago (last summer), but alas, I am at
a intitutiion of higher learning, and cannot do such volunteer work. (Flying
across country all the time costs mucho dinero.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Alexander M. Rosenberg ~ INTERNET: ali...@ucscb.ucsc.edu ~ Yoyodyne ~
~ Crown College, UCSC ~ UUCP:...!ucbvax!ucscc!ucscb!alibaba~ Propulsion ~
~ Santa Cruz, CA 95064 ~ BITNET:alibaba%uc...@ucscc.BITNET ~ Systems ~
~ (408) 426-8869 ~ Disclaimer: Nobody is my employer ~ :-) ~
~ ~ so nobody cares what I say. ~ ~
Clive Steward
>>
> I think you're missing something here.
> I'd hate to see someone fly a plane (or even drive a car) if he could look out
> the window or look at his guages, but not both at the same time.
I don't mean to pick on Ken, because he's not the only one.
But think that some of the work$tation users who are in this discussion
are missing very important information. You can see everything at the same
time. Please try a Mac with Multifinder.
I am using one now. It is nothing like working with Switcher, which
is probably what you are thinking of. (Switcher was fine in its day, too).
There is absolutely no difference between this and the 'generic workstation'
model which has been around for 10+ years in various forms. You can have as
many (overlapping, movable, sizeable, etc.) windows as you can find readable
screen for; you can see events changing in all of them, at the same (sliced,
just as with *nix etc.) time. It does cost less. The slicing is grainier,
though usually not noticeably so.
Only one window allows input at a time. I have never seen another system
otherwise. The menu bar tracks the input-able window. This is easy to use.
There are full facilities for pop-up menus anywhere on the screen, and
adjuncts such as heirarchical menus; have been for years now. Many programs
use them, including the MFMenus init which I am using now, which makes the
most used parts of the finder interface (layer selection, DA's) to a
pop-up w/hierarchy menu anywhere on the screen, in any program.
It works very well, and I think you would like it, if you tried it.
Clive Steward
Andy J. Williams
>to the Mac's popularity (due, in turn, to being the first kid on the block
>with affordable windows) *everyone* has been copying those stupid menus.
>Atari even emulates Apple's one-button paradigm on their 2-button mouse.
>
>Amiga at least has a separate menu button. But I still have to drag the mouse
>halfway across the screen to get at the menus when I hit it. I'd MUCH rather
>have context-sensitive pop-up menus. But, nooooo. Apple came up with pull-down
>menus and that's the way it'll be. The CP/M-style-system-calls of the windowing
>world.
>
Well, the philosophy behind the Mac is to be easy to use. I think that
having a centralized, rarely changing, and standard format and place for
menus is much easier for the Computer Neophyte to use than having random
pop up menus all over the place. But even these are part of the standard
ROM now as well as Heirarchical (sp). I think that PullDown menus are the
best idea simply because they are always there, should always have the same
functions in the relative same place (God, wouldn't it be great if everyone
followed the User Interface Guidelines?) and do the relative same things?
(Open, Close, Save, Save as..., Cut, Copy... all and more)
How would a new user who has no idea what is going on feel about buttons
in random places on the screen, never the same, and try to find the one
that does what he/she wants? This way everyone knows what the hell is going
on and more time can be spent USING the Mac instead of learning applications.
>--
>-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva `-_-'
>-- normally ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter U
>-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.
-Andy
--
Andy J. Williams'90 |_ /| ACK! |BITNET: a...@eleazar.dartmouth.edu
HB 509 Dartmouth Clg|\`o_O'Systems|UUCP:{ihnp4,decvax,linus}!dartvax!eleazar!ack
Hanover, NH 03775 | ( ) |DISCLAIMER: You better like my opinions,
603-643-7727 | U --ACK! | my mother can beat up your mother...
Walter Ray Smith
> What happens on the Mac II when a task wants 8 bit
> planes --- Does the whole desktop change into 8-bit plane mode?
Things kind happen the other way around on the Mac II. The user sets
the number of bits on the screen, and the applications adjust
themselves. Color Quickdraw is set up to handle this by making the
display less accurate (if you want a certain color, but there aren't
any more colors available, you get the closest existing one).
You're right; some mechanism is always needed for dealing with the
window clutter. I imagine the Mac solution will be a "Set Aside"
operation that packs up a running application into an icon on the
desktop. This was part of the Lisa interface, and since Macs are
slowly turning into Lisas (multitasking, menu-bar switching,
stationery documents, etc.), it would make sense.
- Walt
--
Walter Smith, CS graduate student, Carnegie-Mellon University
uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!wrs ARPA: Walter...@andrew.cmu.edu
usps: 5706 Darlington Rd.; Pittsburgh, PA 15217
Andy J. Williams
>I've been thinking about an extension to the standard Mac interface where
>a multiple-button mouse is simulated using modifier keys. I propose that
>option-clicking (or control-clicking) should display a hierarchical popup menu
>of the titles in the menu bar. For example, in a simple program with just
>an Apple, File, and Edit menu, you would get the following:
>
> -------------
> | A > |
> | File > |
> | Edit > |
> -------------
>
>This menu would popup next to the mouse location and behave as a normal
>hierarchical menu.
A DA that does this already exists. It is called Popup and I believe it
is available on SUMEX. Once you activate the DA it will pop this exact
menu up whereever you click with Shift and Command down. It is a very nice
thing to have if you are using a large screen. I use it alot with BigScreen
Init (which is almost the same as having a large screen.) It would be nice
if this were an INIT or a CDEV. You have to select the DA each time you
reboot.
> Gregory Dow ARPA: elc...@garnet.berkeley.edu
-Andy
--
Still amused by setenv NAME
>a multiple-button mouse is simulated using modifier keys. I propose that
>option-clicking (or control-clicking) should display a hierarchical popup menu
>of the titles in the menu bar.
alternative to the standard interface. The reason the Macintosh has a one-
button mouse (in case anyone doesn't know) is that the average user works
faster with a single button. Apple tested this fairly extensively, and it
turns out that most people get confused when there's more than one button on
the mouse.
The guiding philosophy here should be the same as that behind the command
key equivalents for menus: if a user knows what she's doing, there should
be shortcuts available to her, but the shortcuts may only duplicate already
existing functionality. ALL of the power of an application should be readily
accessible to a novice user. (Is anyone at Microsoft listening?)
I would recommend implementing this as a CDEV, so that the user can disable
it in the event that it conflicts with a particular application. If you want
to send me the code, I'll give it a try (but no promises).
-Matt
--
Matt Bamberger "Ill-equipped to act,
1005 E. 60th St., #346 With insufficient tact,
Chicago, IL 60637 One must put up barriers
312-753-2261 To keep oneself intact." - Rush
Bruce G. Barnett
|desktop interface couldn't sit on top of NeWS.
Absolutely right. NeWS can emulate any window system I know of.
There is already a GEM emulator. In fact, you can theoretically
pop up a menu and choose which window system you would like to
emulate. This would even work with applications in shrink-wrap
packages, due to the dynamic and flexible nature of NeWS.
Even now there are people whom are emulating SunView, X, and GEM
windows simultaneously.
--
Bruce G. Barnett <bar...@ge-crd.ARPA> <bar...@steinmetz.UUCP>
uunet!steinmetz!barnett
Sho Kuwamoto
Enlighten me. If you have two windows side by side on a Sun, what
happens when you type something from the keyboard? Why should you
choose one over the other in sending characters to it for that one?
Can you really design a system which unnecessarily defines user
activity in a serial manner and *predict* the type of applications you
will see in the future.
You wind up limiting your user interface today and for the future. :-)
In either case, it seems that certain events can only be posted to the
active window (whether or not it is topmost) and you are always going
to have this type of problem. In response to someone who said the
Amiga system was slightly better because it has a seperate button for
the mouse, Get REAL! The Amigas menu bar switches depending on the
active windows, it's just that you can't see it until you hit the
right button.
What happens with context-sensitive popup menus when the program has
no windows open? Say you're running a memory based word processor and
you have two enormous files to edit. You edit the first one, close
it, and edit the second one. Where do you click to get your popup
menus when there are no open windows?
Another thing that scares me. Customizable mice seem fine for a multi
user environment; if I get an account on a new Sun, I copy over my
setup files or whatever and everything is hunky dory, right? But for
a single user machine, I couldn't imagine what would happen if *my*
mac functioned differently from the one my friend has, which
functioned differently from the one the school has for public use.
There are definite problems with the Mac interface, such as the grow
box being in the right hand corner and all. However, these are all a
side effect of the way it was designed. Ease of use was built in
before Apple realized that power was important too. I think a three
button mouse would confuse the, uh, counfuse the... stuffing out of
beginners, especially if all three buttons were somehow necessary to
do the most basic, necessary tasks.
-Sho
SonicYouthREMBeatlesKateBushReplacementsResidentsHuskerDuSeveredHeadsArtOfNoise
ChrisAndCoseyJoyDivisionKillingJokeLaurieAndersonWireLouReedSkinnyPuppyBrianEno
(s...@tybalt.caltech.edu, s...@caltech.bitnet, ...!cit-vax!tybalt!sho)
Bruce G. Barnett
|In article <39...@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> I wrote:
|> Someone once made the point that it is easy to grow downward than to
|> grow upward. That is, it is easier to convert a multi-application,
|> multi-tasking, color window system into a single color, single user
|> system than vice versa.
|
|Incidentally, the Macintosh windowing user interface evolved from the Lisa
|Office System which was a multitasking multiple window, multiple application
|environment. I don't think that there is much difference between a
|color and a monochrome windowing system.
Well, I suppose I wasn't clear. Designing a complex window system that
will work with monochrome or color, single user or multi user, small
hardware or big, floppy or disk, is a difficult job. Look at Sun's
window systems. There was the original, then SunWindows, SunView,
SunDew, NeWS and now NeWS/X11. It is even more difficult to provide a
migration strategy from the old window system.
In simple terms, no window system is ever complete. The better ones
provide the most flexibility.
I read somewhere that 35% of the current Mac software packages
do not obey the guidelines that will provide portability to future
window systems for the Mac. This figure in itself - I believe -
lends some creedence to my claim.
Then there are issues that complex window systems must address.
Let's assume you have several applications running at once.
Now let's assume that one application wants to track the mouse cursor
as it passes through, while others are only interested in the
selection of an item from a menu.
SunView has a selection service that sits above all applications,
and analyzes the stream of input events. It distributes to the
applications the events they are interested in, in a concise
and efficient manner. Mouse-ahead works even in these conditions.
I don't know how the Mac handles this task. I would assume that it is
a lot simpler because only one task runs at a time.
Another example is the evolution from monochrome to color.
How was the migration to a color system handled? Were the system calls
changed, and therefore incompatible? Or were new calls created, that
had similar functions to the monochrome but had new names and
features?
I would be extremely suprised, and extremely impressed, if the
original calls to the monochrome Mac toolkit were integrated into
the color version of the same. If you look at the complexity of
coloring single pixels, and applying boolean masking operations to the
screen, you can see that handling 1-bit deep and 2, 4, 8 or 24 bit
deep pixels are very different at the hardware level.
Yet the software interface should be the same, with only a few
differences. I am guessing about the Mac toolkit. But Sun's PixRect
package has only two special calls for color systems - setting and
getting the current colormap. All of the other calls are used for
both monochrome and color screens.
This leads me to a third example. SunView allows applications to
specify the number of colors needed for each application. If possible,
the colormap will contain as many maps as possible in the 256 possible
values, allowing several tasks to run using just one colormap.
This sort of forethought is needed when planning something like the
color toolkit that is currently stored on ROM on the Mac II.
I know very little about the Mac toolkit, and have only tried to make
some educated guesses. Actually, I look forward to hearing how wrong I am.
But I wouldn't be suprised if the ROM on the Mac II needs a major
re-write when Apple finally get's the REAL A/UX window system working.
An upgrade that will be _required_ - before the new A/UX window system
can be used.