AWCTTYPA@UIAMVS.BITNET ("David A. Lyons") (02/25/89)
>Date: Wed, 22 Feb 89 16:22:00 EST >From: CHEESEBALL%ALBION.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU >Subject: Fool In the Rain > >Lord knows that fools come in many shapes and forms, and that there >are many around this land of ours, but I never thought I'd see the >day where I WOULD SAY THIS: Apple made a sucker out of me! I've had >my GS for 2 years and 2 months and I've yet to get much out of it! I see things from a very different perspective. I've been working with the GS since about June 86, and I've had my own for 2 years now. I've become extremely familiar with the toolbox and GS/OS in that time, and the excitement I've had for it from the beginning from a programmer's point of view is higher than ever, as you know if you've been following my recent posts. Do you subscribe to GEnie or AppleLink--Personal Edition? If not, consider giving them a try. You may be missing out on a lot of public domain or Shareware stuff. People complain about a lot of things on the commercial services, but one thing I've never seen anybody say there is that they haven't gotten much out of their GS. >As a business machine, basically the best you can do is AppleWorks >2.0 (unless you have the patience of 10 dead men) I use AppleWorks quite a bit. Is that bad? It goes 2.5 times faster than on a IIe, and all the GS memory is available for big files. Plus I have desk accessories always available, and a detached keyboard & mouse control. >and as a game machine, the thing is a poor man's Amiga. I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the Amiga. Are you calling it a game machine? I'm not noted for spending extreme amounts of time playing games, but I've bought Zany Golf, Shanghai, and Tetris, and I'm reasonably happy with them. Have you tried those? I don't know what kind of games you want. There's a slick public domain Yahtzee and a Shareware Solitaire that I use, too. >GOD IS THIS THING SLOW! I've never seen a machine as slow in >performing the things IT IS DESIGNED TO DO! Not all the software is slow, but too much of it is. One thing you can do is order a TransWarp GS (see below). Another is to wait for more improvements in software speed (both system software and application software), which I'm confident will be forthcoming. >[...] We have to wait about six eons just for an operating system >that is still too slow and quite confusing to learn. What is confusing about GS/OS? I'll do my best to resolve any confusion. GS/OS is a major improvement over ProDOS 16, both in speed and otherwise. How fast would it have to be to make you happy? What kind of disk drives are you using? (If you're using Apple 3.5 drives, have you formatted your GS/OS disks with a 2:1 interleave? GS/OS can read them considerably faster if you do.) >When I first got the machine, I read Trip Hawkins' summary of the GS' >abilities: "GS stands for 'graphics that are static'." Well, he was >right. Are you talking about static in the sound output? I have a pair of Radio Shack Minimus 0.6 speakers plugged into mine, and I have no complaints about the sound quality. (I even have a fan, which doesn't seem to cause a problem.) >I would have written this letter though if it wasn't for one little >thing that happened over Christmas. I came back from my vacation to >discover that my battery had died. My "10-YEAR" battery was dead at >the ripe old age of slightly over two years. Too bad. If you don't want to pay your dealer to fix it, replace it with a couple of double-A batteries in series. (You might just cut one of the battery's leads, or unsolder one of them, and leave the battery in there--don't just throw it away, because it'll explode when it gets wet. It has lithium in it.) >I have little software after two years, and Trip Hawkins' lovely >company (Electronic Arts) has been saying for these last two years >that they will release a program called EARL WEAVER BASEBALL and then >denying that they will release it. C'mon people stop with the lies. >Last year at this time, I got a call from their head of Customer >Service swearing that it would be out in the spring of '88 for the >GS. Well it isn't. > >I'm guessing that there's two reasons for it. 1) the program was >slower than a dead turtle in molasses during a Nebraskan december >because of the 2.8MhZ clockspeed [...] 2) No one buys GS software. >Is that a pair of good enough reasons? Good enough reasons for lying? No. I doubt that they deliberately lied to you, though. Vaporware is not unique to the GS, nor is it a new thing. They may have decided to give other projects higher priority--I don't know. The moral is not to count on stuff until you see it, I guess. I haven't paid enough attention to Electronic Arts to know whether their promises of future release dates are generally good or not. A 2.8 MHz clock speed alone doesn't make a program slow--it may mean a lot more work is required to make it fast, though. "No one buys GS software"? I disagree...I've bought some. Do you mean that people you know have stolen the commercial software they use rather than buying it? If so, encourage them to buy their software. If it's worth using, it's worth paying for. >Well, I'm NOT GOING TO suggest how to improve the GS. It's bloody >simple: add a coupla graphics modes, and beef up the speed >tremendously (basically treble the clock speed). Yeah, it's simple to say, isn't it? As long as we're talking about making it faster, why not make it a BILLION times faster? That would really be slick, although it's easier said than done. How will adding more graphics modes help? You want lower resolution than 320x200? When throwing around MHz figures, remember that the clock speed determines the number of clock cycles per second, _not_ the number of instruction cycles per second. That's a lot more complicated, and it depends on the particular instructions being executed--but on the average, a 65816 (GS) instruction takes roughly half as many clock cycles as a 68000 (Macintosh) instruction. Problems in boosting the clock rate _include_ finding 65816s that work reliably at higher speeds, and either buying more expensive memory chips with faster access times, or implementing some sort of caching scheme to let the processor spend as little of its time as possible waiting for bytes to get fetched from memory. The TransWarp GS should be shipping shortly if it isn't already. I'll be interested to find out how they dealt with some of the problems. > Dave Srinivasan > CHEESEBALL@ALBION --David A. Lyons bitnet: awcttypa@uiamvs DAL Systems CompuServe: 72177,3233 P.O. Box 287 GEnie mail: D.LYONS2 North Liberty, IA 52317 AppleLinkPE: Dave Lyons
tsouth@pro-pac.cts.com (System Administrator) (03/05/89)
Re: > Date: Thursday 23 Feb 89 3:20 AM CT > From: "David A. Lyons" AWCTTYPA%UIAMVS.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU > Subject: A Fool in the Rain (unhappy with the GS) >> Date: Wed, 22 Feb 89 16:22:00 EST >> From: CHEESEBALL%ALBION.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU >> Subject: Fool In the Rain >> Lord knows that fools come in many shapes and forms, and that there >> are many around this land of ours, but I never thought I'd see the >> day where I WOULD SAY THIS: Apple made a sucker out of me! I've had >> my GS for 2 years and 2 months and I've yet to get much out of it! > I see things from a very different perspective. I've been working > with the GS since about June 86, [etc...] David, I've been telling Apple for over a year now that they ought to hire you! > Do you subscribe to GEnie or AppleLink--Personal Edition? If not, > consider giving them a try. This is a very biased opinion (which may have something to do with the fact that ALPE cost $18/hour in Hawaii) but personally I'll never understand just why ALPE was conceived in its current state. To me, the system would have been much better if they had used the best (and cheapest!) online service available (GEnie), and just modified a small section of the RTC to support ALPE on GEnie. This would have been more advantageous to Apple, GEnie, and the thousands of users who are not able to afford the overpriced rates of other services besides GEnie. Maybe, ALPE will allow you to talk to Apple more directly, but it is just not worth the extra money for me (and probably a number of others) to join when we have to work hard just to pay off the Apple ]['s and Mac's in the first place. :) Of course, ALPE has been noted to have a number of bugs in the system by others which makes it cumbersome (flame me, I can't remember everyone), and GEnie is slow in some respects; but at $5/hour for GEnie vs. $18/hour for ALPE I can afford a little slowness from the former. >> As a business machine, basically the best you can do is AppleWorks If you believe this then you are not taking the time to look around for anything else. There are a number of business applications and alternatives to Appleworks. Personally, I like Appleworks. With some Timeout accessories installed, there is nothing I have seen anywhere which can beat the program for productivity on MY scale. Since I do not run a large business, I have no idea how it would be applied to something on this scale. But, I have seen at least 15 small businesses (100 or less employees) runnning sucessfully with an Apple IIe or Apple IIgs computer as the main accounting center. >> and as a game machine, the thing is a poor man's Amiga. > I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the Amiga. Are you > calling it a game machine? No matter what anyone says, the Amiga concept is primarily promoted as a game machine/animation work station, IMHO. While it may have a multi-tasking o/s, the directing commands and interface for the machine are more cumbersome than running Apple ][ DOS 3.2 and Integer BASIC (just to allow you non-amiga fans some reference point). I agree that the Amiga is a better hardware machine than the IIgs, but the implementation of the system, and support for applications that I am interested in are little to none. With the introduction of the Amiga 2500UX, I have had my own interest in the Amiga rekindled. By September Fest 89, I should have $2000 in cash saved up to purchase a new computer (along with credit to cover the extra stuff) and I am seriously looking into purchasing the 2500UX with the Unix operationg system. If Apple does not come out with a new Apple ][ computer by September, that's where I will be placing my money. If Apple comes out with a new IIgs which does not support a decent speed and/or someone doesn't come out with a decent C compiler for the IIgs, I will probably purchase the thing anyway, as I am tired of not being able to write good (read -- compact, fast, non-cumbersome) C code on my machine. >> GOD IS THIS THING SLOW! This has been attributed to a number of reasons. Apple representatives continue to publicly state that this was a design problem due to the lack of reliable 65816's which could run at a higher speed. Other sources have suggested everything including Apple marketting schemes for the Macintosh (e.g., a fast IIgs would outsell the Mac's), lack of personnel available to produce a better design (again due to the fact that all of Apple's resources were dumped into the Mac), and the fact that Apple really wanted to kill the whole Apple II project and install Mac's in the K-12 arena (not very believable, but possible). Please realize, these are just a few of the many reasons I have heard throughout the last two years, but I personally believe that Apple wanted to milk a "cash cow" with minimal R&D costs. >> [...] We have to wait about six eons just for an operating system >> that is still too slow and quite confusing to learn. > What is confusing about GS/OS? I'll do my best to resolve any > confusion. Any programming tutorials you (David) care to pass along, I am also ready to receive! I really do appreciate the attention you pay to the net. I have seen eight year olds learn how to use the Finder inside of GS/OS in 15 minutes. How hard can the user interface be? >> When I first got the machine, I read Trip Hawkins' summary of the GS' >> abilities: "GS stands for 'graphics that are static'." Well, he was >> right. > Are you talking about static in the sound output? No, he's talking about the graphics which you can seen being drawn to the screen. One thing that has always amazed me about the Apple ][ family is all of the trouble which the programmers have to go through to make animation work on these machines. I guess I could live with this, but you got to admit that it is rather annoying to watch pull-down menus being drawn. >> My "10-YEAR" battery was dead at the ripe old age of slightly over >> two years. > Too bad. If you don't want to pay your dealer to fix it... > [installing two AA batteries] Of course, doing this will not only void any warranty or Apple-Care service, but most Apple technicians will not work on machines which have home-brew changes to them. >> Well, I'm NOT GOING TO suggest how to improve the GS. It's bloody >> simple: add a coupla graphics modes, and beef up the speed >> tremendously (basically treble the clock speed). > How will adding more graphics modes help? You want lower resolution > than 320x200? David, you can be so innocent sometimes. Of course, he means that we want HIGHER resolution modes! Personally, I'll never understand what the problem was with making a vertical resolution of 400. This 200 stuff is Commodore 64 technology. Maybe Dave S. is one of the thousands of IIgs users that is pissed off that Apple upgraded an 8-bit machine's clock speed before the 16-bit machine's. :) >> Dave Srinivasan >> CHEESEBALL@ALBION > --David A. Lyons bitnet: awcttypa@uiamvs And me! Todd South -- UUCP: {nosc, uunet!cacilj, sdcsvax, hplabs!hp-sdd, sun.COM} ...!crash!pnet01!pro-nsfmat!pro-pac!tsouth ARPA: crash!pnet01!pro-nsfmat!pro-pac!tsouth@nosc.MIL INET: tsouth@pro-pac.CTS.COM - BITNET: pro-pac.UUCP!tsouth@PSUVAX1