oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (10/25/87)
This is a reply to an article in comp.society.futures. I am
crossposting to comp.sys.mac, because it has some interesting things
to say about why the Mac is the way it is.
Take a look at the Canon Cat. Jef Raskin, who was the original person
at Apple working on the Macintosh (before Steve Jobs replaced him with
himself.) started a company called "Information Appliances". He has
been working for a number of years on his vision of what an
information appliance is.
The company's first product was a ROM board that fit into an Apple II,
and made it behave similarly to their second product, the Canon Cat.
Imagine a Macintosh with: only 256k of memory, no mouse, no graphics,
no file system, no operating system, and only one font, which is not
even proportionally spaced. The keyboard is permantly attached, and
the micro-floppy is beside the display instead of below it.
On the Macintosh, a floppy is ejected under software control so a
naive user cannot remove it when it is in an invalid state. The Cat
has the old fashioned and error-prone direct push button.
No file system: it stores a single document on each floppy. (Documents
can have sections, but the user is responsible for maintaining the
table of contents.)
No operating system: it comes up in one program, a simple word
processor. The word processor has one level of undo (but you can't
undo typing, so it isn't clear which operations are undoable.)
The word processor has a certain amount of extra functionality over,
say , the original wordstar. It has a dictionary, and a "Spell" key. Select
an arithmetic expression, and hit the calculate key, and it will
fill in the result after an "=" sign. Select a phone number and hit
"dial" and it apparently adds the entire telecommunications session to
the current document. (So much for using a remote screen editor.)
Spell, calculate, and dial are done by holding down a "blue" special
shift key, then pressing a letter that has that command written on its side.
No mouse: not even any arrow keys. Motion and selection are both done
by incremental search: you hold down a special search forward or
search back shift key while you type. These special shift keys, called
"leap keys" are located below the space bar. Let go of the leap key
and you are out of search mode. Press it again, and you search again.
(I think having these is a good idea. Getting rid of the mouse and
arrow keys, and every other difference from the Mac I've described
here is a bad idea.)
Price is between $1000.00 and $1500.00 I think.
Conclusion: the machine is a small, simple solution to a problem that
is becoming more and more obselete. It is a great
computer-as-super-personal-typewriter, in a world where the typewriter
is going the way of the dinosaur, being replaced by the personal
typesetter+drafting table. If this is Jef Raskin's vision of the
people's computer, I can only say, Thank God for Steve Jobs.
catty comment: I'm told the system software is all written in Forth.
Forth programmers always do a quick job that solves the problem, only
the solution is (1) only 80% there, and (2) usually the wrong problem.
(I know, I used to be a forth programmer, and I did things like write
a complete music editor in 1 day.)
This whole thing was written in response to an article in
comp.society.futures on "Whatever happened to Small is Beautiful?",
Lamenting that the window systems and text processors of today are
bigger and more poewerful than the ones of a few years ago. One answer
is today's systems don't solve the same problems. a Second answer is:
Want to buy my 48kRAM CP/M system? It can run old WordStar, and I'll
sell it to you for only $300.00, which is 1/10 what I bought it for 5
years ago. It works fine, and still does everything it ever did, I
just don't want that anymore.
--- David Phillip Oster --I'm not an actor, but I play one
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --on TV.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu