Hardware Driven?

[ucbvax!works]

>From Jeffrey@Office-2 Wed Mar 10 09:54:31 1982

I've been reading WorkS mail for a couple of months. I have the
impression that the discussions like current commercial workstation
technology tend to be hardware driven.

Recently the Apple people (yes, that's Apple like in Apple II and
Apple ///) have been consistently saying that they think the real
problems are software problems. Unix may be a wonderful system for
developing and maintaining files of source code, but how do you
support any graphic application under Unix?

I hear rumors that the next Apple machine may support a sophisticated
application development environment including a language like
Smalltalk. If this is true, then Apple may steal the show for the
next generation of small systems.

My impression of things is that with sophisticated "information
graphics" software development capabilities, small computers can be
really be made orders of magnitude more useful than the ones we are
seeing today (and that includes the vanilla 68000/Unix systems).

I'd love to hear comments, responses - anything. Can anyone describe
the high level application development facilities available through
existing systems. I'm very interested in facilities which can be
used to by software to manipulate sophisticated displays displays.
The kinds of things that SUN and STAR are aiming towards.

Does anyone know what Apple has been doing for several years with all
those computer scientists (I doubt that they are writing Apple II
applications in AppleSoft).

Thanks,

Jeffrey Stone
Menlo Park, Ca.

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