kim@analog.UUCP (Kim Helliwell ) (05/25/84)
After reading the recent postings of INFO MAC traffic (for which I thank the poster) I can't help but respond to the tantrums of Jerry Pournelle regarding the Mac. (perhaps at the risk of repeating some things already said.) Jerry appears to me to have evaluated so many pieces of hardware and software and looked so much at the flaws and problems of everything that comes into his hands, that he is losing the objectivity to see the good points. He is definitely at his best when he is fighting the Good Fight against venal software vendors for shoddy documentation, poor support, intimidating license agreements, and vile copy protection schemes, and I cheer him for those efforts. But it is possible that he has become so negative about the efforts of the industry (or, perhaps, certain players therein) that he is unwilling to see the good in anything as well hyped (and, admittedly, over-hyped) as the Macintosh. I seem to remember that when the IBM PC first came out (and it was pretty well hyped, too, if I recall correctly), it didn't have very much in the way of either software or peripherals available for it, and IBM was quoted as saying that certain very desirable peripherals, for example, would be supplied by independent manufacturers. Ditto for much of the desirable software. And lo, now 2 years later, that has all come to pass, perhaps with a vengeance. So it isn't very surprising that Apple would do the same sort of thing with the Mac. This sort of thing is common in the entire computer industry (e.g. witness the history of DEC's VAX), and is nothing to get alarmed about, in my opinion, UNLESS the Mac totally bombs commercially. I think it is significant that Jerry acquired a Mac in the first three months of its existence, but he waited until the PC was about 1.5 years old and had LOTS of hardware add-ons, support, and software available before he bought one and reviewed it. Fairness would dictate that he at least wait a year before seriously reviewing the Mac. Let's compare apples with apples (or with IBM's, on an equal footing). I really enjoy Jerry's BYTE columns, and read them even when I read nothing else in BYTE. I expect to continue to enjoy them, but I will take what he says with a grain of salt. I will be interested in what he has to say about the Mac in his column, as opposed to what he said in this forum. The question of the hour is, "will he tone it down, any?" Kim Helliwell hplabs!analog!kim
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (06/02/84)
But the Mac is so damned S L O W ! ! !
D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-4146
USENET: {decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgarykeller@uicsl.UUCP (06/06/84)
#R:analog:-13100:uicsl:5800001:000:1010 uicsl!keller Jun 6 14:54:00 1984 I spent about 3 hours working with a Mac and cannot see any justification for characterizing it as slow. The Mac I used belongs to a friend who is writing his thesis on it and so far he loves it. The only annoyance seems to be trying to get along with one disk drive. The Mac needs about 270k worth of system code space on one drive and forces you to do a lot of disk swapping when changing applications. A second drive cures the problem. With more memory and double sided drives the Mac won't have the same behavior. All screen operations are very fast and the inherent CPU power is far above IBM 8088 based systems. I use a XEROX Dandelion at work and can say that as a mouse/window based system the Mac is superb. If the $35k Dandelion had the same price performance ratio I would be delighted. I am amused by the widespread misunderstanding of the benefits of the mouse and window interface. A knowledgeable and fast typing UNIX user can be beat by a knowledgeable mouse/window/menu user any day. -Shaun