info-mac@uw-beaver (01/14/85)
From: vax135!petsd!peora!jer@Berkeley In a recent posting to this conference, someone criticized Apple's design with respect to the swapping of segments to disk. In reality, this is not so new or unusual for microcomputers -- it's exactly how the UCSD p-System manages memory (and in fact, the UCSD p-System doc- umentation uses the same term "virtual memory" that this author used, even- though the implementation is closer to the very old-fashioned automatic overlay than virtual memory). This is not surprising: Apple Pascal is based on the UCSD p-System; most of Apple's people were probably well familiar with the idea, and so it was a natural choice. And in fact, one of the principal authors of the Macintosh software was responsible for the Apple Pascal UCSD p-System port, according to his biographical information published in some of the commercial magazines. Unfortunately, the Mac OS shares with the p-System another very irritating feature -- it's hard to abort programs. Almost all operating systems, both large and small, allow the user to type some character to immediately ter- minate a program's execution. Termination is almost instantaneous. Not so with the Mac (or to a lesser degree, the p-System); the former provides an "abort event", but the user has to process it; the latter provides a character to abort a program, but the system then churns for 15-30 seconds or so before the user finally gets control (and the user has to respond to a prompt telling him he aborted the program before this happens). This is very frustrating, expecially when you accidentally double-click an icon and have to wait the 30 seconds or so for it to start up so you can select the "quit" option. In another recent posting, someone suggested "a Unix-like menu of commands like cat, etc., output redirection..." and so on. At first this seemed ridiculous to me... but if you think about it, it would be very nice to have a graphical "pipe" that could be put between processes to show the flow of data among filters. It would even go along with the current user-interface philosophy on the Mac (as opposed to something like nm | sort | pr -c3 | lpr you could connect the nm, sort, pr, and lpr icons with these graphical pipes.)