bees@drutx.UUCP (DavisRB) (05/23/84)
28-Mar-84 13:59:14-CST,3331;000000000000 Return-Path: <PATTERMANN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Received: from SUMEX-AIM.ARPA by UTEXAS-20.ARPA with TCP; Wed 28 Mar 84 13:59:05-CST Return-Path: <Piersol.Pasa@PARC-MAXC.ARPA> Received: from PARC-MAXC.ARPA by SUMEX-AIM.ARPA with TCP; Wed 28 Mar 84 10:51:04-PST Date: Wed, 28 Mar 84 10:51 PST >From: Piersol.Pasa@PARC-MAXC.ARPA Subject: Re: Jerry E. Pournelle In-reply-to: "POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA's message of 28 Mar 84 03:17 EST" To: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA> cc: STERNLIGHT@USC-ECL.ARPA,Piersol.Pasa@PARC-MAXC.ARPA,Ed Pattermann <PATTERMANN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>, mike@RICE.ARPA ReSent-date: Wed 28 Mar 84 11:09:21-PST Jerry, We don't want you to become mindless, just reasonable. Everything Apple has done, for which you are willing to specifically indict them, is similar to what I've seen on EVERY new machine to come out, unless it was just a rehash of some older, similar machine. Sure, you'll get lots of available software if you buy a Kaypro-10, or an IBM PC clone. This is a good reason to buy such a machine. However, this mentality would eventually mean that we'll be using PC clones well past the year 3000! Macintosh is a NEW machine. This may be the reason why no one wants to hear about its lack of software AT PRESENT. No radically new machine has ever appeared loaded with tons and tons of debugged, excellent software. Why do you insist so vociferously that Macintosh must, or be tossed out the door as useless? This thinking seems deliberately designed to prevent the machine from getting a fair start. Why? Further, why do you insist that Macintosh be compatible with kluge ideas like arrow keys and Escape keys? This sort of demand mandates that every new machine be compatible with every old interface method that was ever invented. Why not complain about how the IBM PC won't punch and read Hollerith cards and paper tape? Think of all that old batch software you cant use because your home computer doesn't support HASP and JCL! Toss it out, it's useless to everyone. If Macintosh were designed solely to be a terminal for EMACS, your complaints about keys would have merit. Since it's designed to have its own word processors, though, who cares if there is no arrow key, escape key, or meta key? Not me, nor anyone not intimately associated with using EMACS on his mainframe. These sorts of ideas, when examined in the cold light of reason, are what are irritating to some of us. Why is it so difficult for you to avoid sweeping statements regarding the usefulness of the machine? Why not use this Bulletin Board as a medium for exchange of facts and suggestions, rather than a podium for opinions which many of the rest of us don't want to be bothered with? Kurt P.S.: "ye flinking gods. LOVE ME, I am APPLE, and you MUST LOVE ME! Anything less than total devotion shall be punished" " I am getting damned tired of the MacHype, and especially the kind of crap represented by your comments about my "emotionalism". Anything less than total devotion to the Mac is, I gather, punishable. One does not question the Good Guys." This isn't emotionalism? What is that, reasoned argument and discussion? K. P.P.S.: By the way, I take mine to the laundry. Cleanliness is next to open-mindedness! K. 28-Mar-84 19:08:05-CST,17630;000000000000 Return-Path: <PATTERMANN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Received: from SUMEX-AIM.ARPA by UTEXAS-20.ARPA with TCP; Wed 28 Mar 84 19:07:21-CST Return-Path: <STERNLIGHT@USC-ECL.ARPA> Received: from USC-ECL.ARPA by SUMEX-AIM.ARPA with TCP; Wed 28 Mar 84 11:22:20-PST Date: Wed 28 Mar 84 11:21:24-PST >From: STERNLIGHT <STERNLIGHT@USC-ECL.ARPA> Subject: Re: Jerry E. Pournelle To: POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA, mike@RICE.ARPA, STERNLIGHT@USC-ECL.ARPA In-Reply-To: Message from "Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>" of Wed 28 Mar 84 00:17:00-PST ReSent-date: Wed 28 Mar 84 15:24:30-PST Apologies in advance for the length of this but Pournelle has escalated the level of heat in the conversation about the Mac, together with several offensive personal charges and numerous factual errors, all in the public domain rather than by private message. The following is a detailed treatment of his last two messages. I suggest that those who would be offended, bored, annoyed or otherwise made unhappy or uncomfortable hit control-o or control-c (or whatever) now. I hope we can 'get off it' quickly. 1. "ye flinking gods. LOVE ME, I am APPLE, and you MUST LOVE ME! Anything less than total devotion shall be punished." It seems to me, Jerry, that you made that up. I never suggested that attitude towards Apple; in fact I have a number of problems of my own with them, but not the ones you complain of. 2. "Tell me, MacSir: if I am a business man and I put together a large and important financial model, how shall I save it? How back it up? How many swaps? You save it with an outrider disk if you don't like swaps. They are shipping NOW. But they add weight to the mac and take up space, so those who don't want them can save that, and money, too. The author of the Finder is revising it to swap with 100k buffers. That will make it copy with far fewer swaps. The size of the disk and its rigidity make swaps physically fast and easy. 3. "And if I wish to DO SOMETHING USEFUL, with what do I macDo It? You buy software as it becomes available, just like everyone else. When most machines are new, very little software is available. Lots is coming. Of course you don't buy a Mac for a specific purpose until the software is available. Nobody suggested you do. 4. "I am getting damned tired of the MacHype, and especially the kind of crap represented by your comments about my "emotionalism". Anything less than total devotion to the Mac is, I gather, punishable. One does not question the Good Guys. This paragraph, and paragraph 1 above convicts you out of your own mouth of emotionalism, if any further proof were needed. Some of us are getting tired of your temper tantrums on a professional medium (info-mac). This isn't a high-school hackers' bulletin board. 5. "Well, we have bought a Mac for 3000 bucks, and the documents that explain the error codes and such like for another 150; which is why I had no need to take you up on your macoffer, and besides, I didn't need another dose of machype about how macwonderful it is. Since I made my offer to share information and experience with you in sober professional terms, and since you know from our previous conversations that I am a 51-year-old Ph.D. with an M.I.T. computer science background, another tantrum is non-responsive to my offer. For $150 you got detailed explanations of the operating system, how to program and use the internal ROM routines and a lot more than just the 'error codes and such-like', in 3 thick 3-ring binders. How about dealing from the top of the deck in your remarks? 6. "I have yet to get a logical answer to the question of what the computer for the rest of us can DO just now. Right now it can do Multiplan spreadsheets fairly well, and with a better user interface than any previous version of Multiplan, which is considered by many of us to be one of the two or three best spreadsheet/financial modeling programs around. I don't need to remind you that it was a primitive ancestor of Multiplan called Visicalc that sold thousands of micro-computers in business applications. It can be programmed, for those who wish, in BASIC. Before you dismiss that as derisory, there is already one public domain program, MacTep, which does excellent remote terminal access to micros and mainframes, and operates at pretty high speeds despite its being in an interpreted form of Basic. It can do a very nice job of short (1-6 page) memos and letters. It can allow one to draw useful sketches and charts. It is just getting started; smart college students who are on budgets and in many cases are computer science majors who know, better than you or I, what they are doing are beating down the doors to get the machine. Of course they are getting a promotional price, but their financial resources are also far less than most of us who work for a living. As a professional economist I would have to say that their utility curves (taking account of their income) at the discounted price are roughly comparable to ours at full price. In other words, they pay less, but they have much less money to spend and so it's a wash. 7. "True: if they can sell enough of them, then the software may appear (assuming the deliberate limits to the machine such as the soldered in 128 k of memory and the single drive and the keyboard with no escape key and no arrow keys and the non-available numeric keypad (not available at our store anyway, and unimportant; I presume it will come) -- assuming the inherent limits don't stop the software, then if they sell enough of them it will get written. The software is already beginning to appear and a lot is being written right now. Very few serious and substantial software developers are waiting to see 'if they can sell enough of them.' The soldered-in memory is for reliability. Apple conducted tests that convinced them that was in the interests of the users. Too bad if a few hobbyists can't plug chips in and out. Most of us prefer the reliability and Apple's stated plans are for a board swap at a very good price when more memory is available reasonably from at least two sources. Very professional. This isn't a tinkertoy for hobbyists but a serious machine. I don't know about you, but I and most professional knowledge workers also buy annual service contracts and bring our machines into our dealers for repair. We have neither the time nor the inclination to play with our professional tools internals any more than we would fix our own TV set power supplies. The keyboard is definable in software. In MacTerminal, there is an escape key. It's Microsoft who messed up by not defining one in Basic, not Apple. They also forgot the ASCII delete character in the Basic keyboard, and we both use that to access certain mainframes. But my pre-release version of Macterminal does ASCII delete just fine with Control-Backspace. If you want to complain about Microsoft please join me. There's a perfectly good Microsoft User's Group on Compuserve. Arrow keys probably come on the numeric keypad. Again that's a cost, size and weight saving for those of us who don't want it. I suspect that arrow keys were deliberately omitted, probably on the orders of Steve Jobs. The mouse/point model allows you to go directly where you want, without typing arrow-arrow-arrow-.... Besides, the machine does have very powerful arrows. They're called scroll bars and they're on the screen. For someone who is often harping on new technology I am surprised you cling to first generation computer interface ideas like arrow keys. 8. "A neat job. Like a Hollywood movie. Go to the star and say you have the script; to the director and say you have a star; to the writer and say you have a director; to the money people and say you have star, script, and director; and with luck you will have made it all retroactively true. If you do not bring it off, well... More Pournelle hype. The analogy doesn't hold, but it sounds good when you're in full flight. 9. "So Apple treats its customers as venture capitalists, and that's all right; but then they will not listen to any suggestions (you cannot imagine how many PLEADED with them to add another drive, or at least have the extra drive available when it came out) and to keep the price at something reasonable is not within their intent. No they don't. I don't know anything about suggestions, but with all the money Apple spent and with the future of the company riding on this, you can bet they listened, and decided rationally. They just didn't take your advice, Jerry. Sorry about that, but it's their money where their mouth is, not yours. A reasonable price is one where you sell a lot of product (that demonstrates that you know the market and it is worth the price to those who buy) and you make a good profit (that demonstrates your ability to stay in business, support your products and develop future ones, and reward your investors (of both money, talent and time)). Nobody is FORCED to buy a Mac. A 'reasonable' price has nothing to do with cost but with value received. If you make a huge profit so much the better. That shows you really know how to deliver value efficiently and will probably be around for a while. Of course I would like a Mac for $1000, or even $100, but that has nothing to do with a fair or reasonable price; just what I'd like. 10. "Are those facts? Then if it were not an apple product -- if it were IBM -- would you condemn anyone for wondering what all the shouting is about? Ye immortal gods. Do you wash your own brains, or do you take them to a laundry? Now that we've seen that your hysterics are not facts, I guess I am willing to be magnanimous and ignore your last sentence. On second thought, no I won't; it's a good example of another regrettable characteristic you have of attacking the intelligence, good faith, bona fides or just plain humanity of those who disagree with you. If you keep it up, you will eventually lose your god-given licence to participate in rational discussion in a free society. It will happen simply: you will just get ignored after a while. 11. "tell me: why is everything: WILL be; Gonna be; the "new BIOS will"; Tecmar will-- in present tense, what can a business man do (safely) with a Mac? see above. 12, "as to the edge of technology, surely you don't believe that there's anything all that unusal in mac and lisa? the modula-2 operating system is public domain and integrates not only graphics but a debugger and editor; real editor. Now I know you understand bit-mapped displays, mouse/icon technology, the Xerox Star, the Lisp machines, the Alto, and the PERQ. What Apple did is do a subset cheaply and for a large market. And they added a lot of very usable concepts and software (in the Lisa as a 'model'). Some of their software goes far beyond what others have done. So get off it. 13. "It's gonna be; will be; wonderful. Perhaps. I hope so. But for the moment I see a lot of peole with $2500 hangovers wondering what the micro revolution is all about once they tire of drawing pretty pictures. I guess the pot's half-empty for you. For me it's half full, with software coming and people beating down the doors of their dealers to get a machine that they can sit down and try to their heart's content before committing one thin dime. Have you gone into any Computerlands lately? 14. "WHY is everything so non-standard? Read Tom Kuhn's book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." The new paradigm has to break down the old, sometimes (intellectually) violently, unless you want to wait until all the old-paradigm people die of old age. It's a new standard, Jerry, and an overt rejection of many of the old ones. The market is saying it's right, so far. Get with the program or you'll get left. 15. "Why can't we get source code into the mac? when will there be REAL compilers for it? We will. If you are willing to write 'real' Forth, that will be out in April in Mac standalone. Real Pascal about mid-year in learning form, about year-end in software development form. Real Basic now. Microsoft Basic, whatever you think of it, is an industry standard of a kind; it probably runs on more different machines than any other Basic. I moved a lot of my Z80 cp/m basic software over to the Mac in an evening and it works just fine. Real C by December (stand-alone). Real assembler/debugger by July (stand-alone). 16. "why is the operating system hidden (or WILL it be explained, in which case, why WASn'T it? It was never hidden. May I remind you that it took more than a year (like two to three) for CP/M's internals to be fully understood and the understandable widely-sold books on it came to market just last year and this year after CP/M had been out for I don't know how long. Many good magazines (and some not-so-good) are still making a living explaining CP/M's internals in article after article. Inside Mac on the other hand, is out a month after the machine's announcement. You bought it; why not read it? 17. "Look, man I conceive it part of my duty in life to keep IBM from taking over the world; but not by acting like they do. I see a machine with limited memory, lots of room for expensive add-ons, and not much more except really nice graphics--that aren't all that much better than others I've seen. (I won't comment on what I think you think your duty in life is.) 128k plus a lot of very tight system code in 64k of ROM is not enormous memory, but the Mac is the lower end of the product line. A 1 meg Lisa is the top. Haven't seen that range in any other mass marketed machines. Last time I looked, $2500 machines often had only 64k of RAM and often no ROM. So 128k plus 64k is not shoddy, either. Of course more would be better. How much did the IBM PC have when it first came out? 64K? How long did it take to get more? 18."The screen is SMALL, the memory is small, there is no backup capability convenient to the user; or have I missed something? Tell me what. I am more than willing to listen. But what I get is long essays about how obnoxious I am; how I am not a believer and shold be cast into the outer darkness. But not much logic and few answers. More Pournelle hype. I don't believe anyone wrote long essays on how obnoxious you are; just short comments suggesting you were not playing with a full deck of information and being very emotional for reasons we still don't understand. The screen is, of course, smaller than some and larger than others. It depends on what working distance you like whether it is SMALL, or just smaller, or maybe even small. We really don't want you in outer darkness. You are a pretty good science-fiction writer, and have a following in your computer columns. All we want is a little balance and realism together with rational discussion instead of flaming and name-calling. Nobody expects you to kiss the hem of Apple's garment. By the same token you might want to stop and think whether when people disagree with you it's because of logic, facts and professional evaluation, not because they watched a television commercial and their brains turned to mud. 19. "Is the answer in all cases "Wait and See?" In which case: what do you think--objectively now--about companies (other than your own) who produce machines and induce people to buy them with the "well, no, it doesn't do much YET, but WOW will it be GREAT when we have enough of your money ..."? Really, Jerry, you'd make a good populist. Apple never said that nor is it true. Most of the improved features people want will come from third party vendors, not Apple. It's their stated policy. It's what's happening. And it's not an inducement, nor did anyone ever use it. I bet your comment sounds really good, though, to those who believe the world is a conspiracy run by "them." 20. "What have I missed? In all the conversation, I get nothing to think about; only invective; which leads me to reply in kind, generating heat but little light. Now that is pure hyperbole (that's what they taught me to call bullshit at the London School of Economics). I sent a private memo to your MIT-MC mailbox with technical comments and an offer to provide more information. I hope we can stop now and return to rational discussion. --david-- ------- -------
darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (06/01/84)
Apparently some (non Mac users) are complaining of a lack of META, ESCAPE
and arrow keys to use with EMACS on a MACterminal. I'm not a macuser, but
I heavily use a similar interface constantly on a Xerox lisp machine.
Emacs is my main editor on VAX unix, and I use it both from ordinary
terminals (so I know and use most of the arcane keybindings) and from a
virtual terminal on Ethernet in a Lisp window. On the Lisp machine I do
most of my cursor movements, scrolling, gross positioning and commands with
the mouse, not from the keyboard. I move a few characters from the keyboard,
anything longer with the mouse, including scrolling (both by number of lines
and percent of file). Most of the commands I use are on menus surrounding
the "terminal". Emacs has so (damn) many commands to provide lots of
flexibility. The mouse subsumes most of them with a small set of paradigms.
(By the way, it took only a few dozens of lines of lines of code in each of
the Lisp machine and emacs to make it work. The programability of Emacs is
quite worthwhile [for wizards, anyway]).
(clue to value of the mouse [to me]: it's got the only uncluttered square
foot of surface area in my office)
--
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA