bhyde@inmet.UUCP (08/28/85)
I enjoyed the Mac World expo in Boston. It was unique in that there were music people and graphic designers in the crowd. Red and blue hair provides a nice contrast against marketing hype and pocket protectors. Both the layout program markets and the music synth. markets seem to be very active on the Mac. I was impressed by a keyboard macro/journaling program called "Tempo". It edits the raw journal so it can play back the journal much faster. For example it will hit buttons before they get drawn, or hit menu's with minimal tracking to get into them. It can have prompts to the user embedded in the "scripts" as well as a primitive conditionals against values found on the clip board. I really wanted one of these for regression testing my program! A very hairy pert chart program was on display. It will do resource leveling as well as let you sellect subsets of the entire project for display. I don't remember the name. The Mac version of pin ball construction set (40$) was available to order or to play with. I was told they expect to sell over a hundred thousand in the first year. You can save pin ball machines and give them to your friends. It was very smooth good sounds and a lot of fun to play. A algebra system for 90$ (again I don't recall the name) was shown and you could order it. From the same distributor as chip wits. You enter your problem in one window and the solution is constructed in another window at a level and style similar to a high school home work problem. I didn't get a clear picture of the extent of this thing's skills, but I suspect it's going to make a lot of high school and freshman teachers unhappy, narc. narc. Four different kinds of lab/electoric interface things were on display. My favorite; for clever/dumb idea, was the one were you design your control system on a multiplan spread sheet. You save the spread sheet, run the controller driver program, finish your "experiment" return to the spread sheet which has now been filled out with your results. All this depends on filling out a rigid spread sheet template that comes with the system. These control system programs are having a lot of trouble handling all the power the mac interface provides. It is clear you could simulate a lab instr. almost exactly, but that requires a lot of software and the rough edges in their software where all showing. I spent some time talking the author of a large family of print drivers for the Mac. His product is around $90 and has a print driver for most every printer that is popular for the micro computer market. We spent some time talking about how awfully hard it is to write a print driver. The bottle neck procedures don't tell you when the graphport data structure is changing so, as he said, you have to do it all with mirrors. There was a 2K$ product for developers that you plug into your Apple II and into your Mac's serial port. You then run a program on the Apple II, it suddenly appears running on the Mac screen (at 1/4 speed). You run it for a while, hit the interupt button, and when you return to the finder you discover a new application. Your Apple II program has been ported to your Mac! They handle overlays, disks, joy-stick to mouse conversion, screen handling, etc. etc. The result runs full speed, and is native 68K code. You need to have run the program thru all it's "choice points" which I think means thru all it's "basic blocks." This product was from Abalon (sp?) systems, who also had a 300dot/inch digitizer. There were about five places there ready and willing to drive your Mac out of warrenty and into fattyness if you would only give them money. I gather that in china the dentists illustrate their skill and experiance by having a large pile of extracted teeth in their window, well one hack your MACer had a huge fish bowl full of legless ram chips. I really badly wanted the clear Mac case that one vidio company had replaced their flesh colored Mac case with. The MacPascal people told me an upgrade was in the pipeline "someplace." There was a nice APL. My favorite quote? On the podium next to the room sized MacIntosh we find Mr. Hype saying as his product reboots. "The Mac in there has a Hyperdrive and General Computer, Apple and our people are working on why this bug happens at this very moment." ben hyde, cambridge.