hsg@duke.cs.duke.edu (Henry Greenside) (04/23/87)
I hope that Apple will be more imaginative than what the rumors are suggesting about Juggler, that it will be a weakly multitasking version of Switcher or Servant. As more and more computers get networked, it becomes more and more useful to be able to logon to several computers at the same time. E.g., I often want to be logged onto our local Sun network to get mail, to a remote supercomputer to keep an eye on executing tasks, and logon to a local Vax where I could run SMP or MACSYMA to do some computer algebra (then cut and paste results into a Macintosh application, etc.) This need for remote logon's to many computers at once is also a reality of the expense of bringing up different kinds of commercial mainframe software on different nodes: numerical libraries, graphics libraries, etc. Will Juggler allow me to run three different versions of VersaTerm-PRO for example (one of my favorite terminal emulators) so that this would be possible? Would each window update correctly (I don't want the background windows being inactive, so that I can be aware of what's going on at each computer)? One can do this sort of thing easily on a Sun or UNIX workstation, but there are no SUN terminal emulators competitive with the state-of-the-art now available in the Macintosh world. Another alternative would be to make Macintosh applications compatible with a UNIX environment and make Juggler a Mac-like interface on top of UNIX so that multiple-identical-applications work in the usual UNIX way. I hope Apple does it right. I have been spoiled by the high quality Mac software now available, but have my doubts about how easily these applications can be brought into a UNIX-like world.