info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (11/22/84)
From: Bill Croft <croft@safe> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 84 20:51 EST From: Reed.SoftArts@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: Re: new SUMacC release and wonder economics To: Bill Croft <croft@SU-SAFE.ARPA>, info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA *From: DPR (David P Reed) In every organization I have worked for, academic or industrial, the per-programmer cost of the machine was $20K or more, for a timeshared VAX type machine. If you include the costs of airconditioning, etc. it gets higher. I love the claim that SUMacC lowers the per programmer cost from around $5K (or even $10K depending on how you count it) for a cadillac Lisa-based development system. Only Reagan is better at this kind of voodoo economics. The whole wonder of workstations and personal computers is that you can deliver better performance and responsiveness to the user at the same or lower cost per user than for timeshared systems. And while I am less than thrilled with the particular mouse-based editor Apple chose for the Lisa, surely in the long run one can produce better tools on the Lisa/Fat MAC than the ancient stuff that passes for wonderful on UNIX in its timeshared, 80x24, monospaced, character-only, mouseless form. But I suppose UNIX and its religion will continue to be adopted by those who want to live in the past. ---- I agree with you, I would prefer developing applications in (very small) Smalltalk on a standalone (very large) Fat Mac. However until Alan Kay gets finished, what do we do? I find UNIX's toolbox (cshell, make, emacs, diff, grep, lpr, etc.) much more friendly than the Lisa workshop. Have you tried diff, grep, or make / shell files on the workshop? UNIX also is more friendly than many of the Mac standalone C development environments. There may be a difference between user-friendly and programmer-friendly. As far as costs go, I was refering to 'incremental' costs for someone who already has access to UNIX and a Mac. I was not encouraging timesharing systems by any means. Some people are using SUMacC on SUN, Metheus, etc. workstations.