ted@imsvax.UUCP (02/06/87)
Pierce T. Wetter of CalTech writes: >ha! ha! ha! >You were kidding, right? I mean no one would be stupid enough to >violently flame apple without knowing the facts, right? Like the >fact that Xerox at one time owned a large portion of apple stock >and was thinking of buying more? But they thought better of it? Makes sense to me, but hardly seems relevant to the topic of the article I posted. >Like the fact that some of the people who developed the original >Lisa interface at one time worked on the Xerox Parc project? Bad move on their part and I'm sure they regret it, but again irrelevant. >No one would be that much of a blazing idiot, right? >Mellowout. > Pierce Wetter right >P.S. If you are so hung up about finding someone to be angry >with why don't you yell at addison wesley. They're charging $600 >a copy for the mac version of TeX, a public domain program. No >site licencing either. Smooth guys real smooth. To be fair, it >isn't really AW's fault they're only distributing it, it the >programs authors who put on the limitations. The fact that the authors would attempt to charge Apple customers $600 for something which is nearly free to the entire rest of the world indicates that they have made a far more damning judgement of the Apple milieu, including the relative level of sophistication of the typical Apple CUSTOMER than I ever have. This isn't terribly insulting to ME, however. Relevant: Adj. Having a significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand. Dan Bricklin, the author of Visicalc who could conceivably claim a copyright on the look and feel of spreadsheets, claims: "The expansion of copyright protection is saying that the whole way we have developed software historically is no good..... Historically, the industry has been made on very small steps, improvements based on existing products." Picture Henry Ford having patented the automobile or the Wright brothers having patented the airplane. The one sure loser would have been the United States, which would have been limited to one brand of car or airplane exactly as Russians are now, while the rest of the world raced ahead with healthy competition. We could easily lose any lead we now enjoy in computers in such a manner. Xerox, which invented the 8010 look and feel in the first place has not been out there suing anyone and reputedly was ready to assist DRI in the Apple suit had it come to court. Xerox is a competent organization which obviously believes in making its living in the real world rather than in courtrooms. That Apple is no longer capable of following such a course has nothing to do with DRI or Atari or anyone else copying the "look and feel" of the 8010 interface, but much to do with another kind of a "look and feel" problem inherent to all Apple products: what I call the look and feel of toys. When Joe Businessman in New York City plunks down $3000 of his hard-earned cash for a small computer, he doesn't want to see plastic, 5" screens, toy keyboards, cutsie logos, machines with one floppy drive, or EXTERNAL floppy drives or anything like that. My first reaction to the Lisa was disbelief; I couldn't believe anyone would even try to sell anything which LOOKED like that in America. Maybe in Borneo or the Australian outback.... The Mac, unfortunately, doesn't qualify as evidence that they learned anything from the Lisa. By the way, InfoWorld reports that Adam Osbourn's PaperBack Software, and Mosaic Software are setting up legal defense funds to fight "look and feel" suits from Lotus over their respective spreadsheet offerings. This is a worthy cause, and anyone interested in the basic health of the industry might consider sending one or both of them a check for $10 or $20. We'd all be better off if this "look and feel" ogre were killed dead. Ted Holden, IMS
andy@thelink.UUCP (02/08/87)
I have to wonder how far somebody can take this nonsense about look and feel. Like, AT&T claiming that Lattice C infringes upon the "look and feel" of their C compiler...
merchant@dartvax.UUCP (02/08/87)
In article <677@imsvax.UUCP>, ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: > > When Joe Businessman in New York City plunks down $3000 of his > hard-earned cash for a small computer, he doesn't want to see > plastic, 5" screens, toy keyboards, cutsie logos, machines with > one floppy drive, or EXTERNAL floppy drives or anything like > that. My first reaction to the Lisa was disbelief; I couldn't > believe anyone would even try to sell anything which LOOKED like > that in America. Maybe in Borneo or the Australian outback.... > The Mac, unfortunately, doesn't qualify as evidence that they > learned anything from the Lisa. > Ted Holden, ...after all, Joe Businessman wants a computer on his desk that LOOKS like a computer. You know, solid steel, EXTERNAL monitors, takes up lots of room on a desk. You know, a computer that says "Hi, I'm a big important machine for a big important man." Obviously, Joe's computer is mostly for looks, anyway. Okay, the screen is small. I don't see too much problem with the keyboard. I put it next to an IBM keyboard and it was the same size. In fact, when I looked at the Mac keyboard, it seemed tiny until I realised that it was a normal size...it just didn't have all the function keys, external keypads, cursor controls, num locks, scroll locks, etc. My only gripe with the Mac keyboard is that I occasionally miss the apostrophe and hit the return. I think that might have been corrected on the new keyboards anyway... The PC-XT has one floppy drive. If you have a hard disk, why do you need two or three floppy drives. If Joe Businessman is being halfway serious, anyway, he has a hard drive. As for cute logos, well, yes, a machine that greets me with "Welcome to Macintosh" might turn off a serious computer user, but most people could really care less. Again, those people who are so concerned with how their computers look and act are probably the people who are more interested in their image. Me? I use my computer to get work done. Whether it looks like a toaster or not, it does lots of things that the IBM PC people around here would kill to be able to do. That does more for my image than having a large hulking machine sitting on my desk looking important. -- "Nyah." Peter Merchant merchant@dartvax.UUCP
pdc@nott-cs.UUCP (02/11/87)
> > Picture Henry Ford having patented the automobile or the Wright This side of the pond he wouldn't have got the patent, someone called Benz had the idea first. He even built the odd car or two! -- Piers Cawley opinions! I'm allowed to have my very own opinions! What's an opinion Mummy?
keith@telesoft.UUCP (02/19/87)
> > > > When Joe Businessman in New York City plunks down $3000 of his > > hard-earned cash for a small computer, he doesn't want to see > > plastic, 5" screens, toy keyboards, cutsie logos, machines with > > ... etc. etc. > > ...after all, Joe Businessman wants a computer on his desk that LOOKS like a > computer. You know, solid steel, EXTERNAL monitors, takes up lots of room on > a desk. You know, a computer that says "Hi, I'm a big important machine for > ... etc. etc. Those of us that do real work, with real desks, greatly appreciate the notion of "small footprint". Just like the fact I can park my Karmann Ghia many places Joe B. can't get his Lincoln. Small is beautiful. Keith -- Keith Allan Shillington telesoft!keith@UCSD.ARPA 619/457-2700x388.ATT My opinions are mine. {ucbvax!sdcsvax,celerity,bigbang}!telesoft!keith.UUCP
nee@sdics.UUCP (02/21/87)
Sender:Clydene Nee Tim Holden writes >The fact that the authors would attempt to charge Apple customers >$600 for something which is nearly free to the entire rest of the >world indicates that they have made a far more damning judgement >of the Apple milieu, including the relative level of >sophistication of the typical Apple CUSTOMER than I ever have. >This isn't terribly insulting to ME, however. While one the subject of sophistication. Why not discuss the corporate scare tactics a certain *large* computer corporation has used on many naive company managers to buy their product. There are many well known stories of managers being told if they didn't buy XXX computer that they would lose their jobs. Ther's a lot to be said about the typical XXX customer. Also, I know of one instance where the salesman sold company Z a computer telling them that it would take care of all of their needs, however, forgot to mention anything about the actual software needed to run the machine. Recently a friend of mine purchased a computer. They were told that the other computer companys around couldn't be trusted to be around in 5 years, and they they would have a hard time getting the machine serviced if it broke down. > When Joe Businessman in New York City plunks down $3000 of his > hard-earned cash for a small computer, he doesn't want to see >plastic, 5" screens, toy keyboards, cutsie logos, machines with >one floppy drive, or EXTERNAL floppy drives or anything like >that. My first reaction to the Lisa was disbelief; I couldn't >believe anyone would even try to sell anything which LOOKED like >that in America. Maybe in Borneo or the Australian outback.... >The Mac, unfortunately, doesn't qualify as evidence that they >learned anything from the Lisa. Yes, I think that everyone can agree that the Lisa was a big disappointment. It is a much better machine than some other things that I have been forced to use in the past. Lets talk about the IBM System 36, where the power buttons are exactly at knee level on the machine. I would like to know who designed this feature. And all the screen driven menus. Yes, and how about the manuals on operation. I have never seen so much poorly written technical documentation. And so much of it....And the training classes on it were laughable. Yes, both the word processor and I loved the feature on the keyboard where you would have to lift you hand off of the home keys to hit the return key. However, if we want to talk about jokes lets discuss the PC jr. I know for a fact that the engineering division one of a big computer company uses A MAC for all their presentation graphics, and the office manager uses it for all of their record keeping. More Joe/Jane Business people are choosing the MAC because it is not a learning intenstive machine. If you where to look at the learning curves for the MAC and related software verses IBM products I'm sure that you would see that the average person would pick up the MAC faster than the IBM. And time is money. Clydene Nee
goer@sphinx.UUCP (02/24/87)
Isn't it about time we stopped carrying on like second graders, saying,
"My machine's better than yours." Neither Apple nor IBM is an ideal outfit to
work with. Apple spends its idle hours suing the competition, instead of
simply making better, cheaper products. IBM sits around playing market-
ing games, and giving people the old line about not being able to get
clones fixed five years from now (Who's going to be using a PC five years
from now? What technician can't service, by and large, any compatible?
Even if a clone fails, you can buy two or three of them for the cost of a
single IBM!).
The Mac and the PC/AT each have advantages. With MS-DOS you get an oper-
ating system that's not going to die soon, tremendous variety in software,
relative ease of development, etc. With the Mac you get incredible flex-
ibility in the video display, and the ability to interface this display
with a printer in a very elegant fashion. To die-hard MS-DOS fanatics, this
is going to sound like a cute, though largely wasteful, use of the CPU. But
look - have you ever tried to, say, display Hebrew, English, and Greek to-
gether on a PC? With an EGA it can be done. But then you have to worry about
printing it. And all the while, you have the tremendous overhead of getting
the machine to do something its designers provided no support for. (Iron-
ically, because Mac software is not so prevalent as MS-DOS software, programs
which do multilingual word-processing with mixed right-left left-right lang-
uages [without screwing up wordwrap, etc.] are actually more readily found
among MS-DOS machines. In fact, I don't believe any full-featured academic
word-processor that does this is available on the Mac, while MS-DOS has two.)
There are many other examples of advantages the Mac's user interface pro-
vides. This is just one.
The bottom line is that points are scored by both machines. On the
other hand, each has distinct deficits - many of which are occasioned by
the attitude of its manufacturers/designers rather than by any intrinsic
deficiencies. I think everyone would agree that each of the two outfits
could take a page out of the other's book. IBM could create a much
more flexible video interface. Apple could adopt an open-information
policy, and, in effect, open up the box. Why not approach this whole matter
in a more even-handed manner, avoiding those silly, often quite uninformed
sorts of value-judgments which have marred much of the discussion?
--Richardsmvorkoetter@watmum.UUCP (02/26/87)
In article <294@sdics.ucsd.EDU> nee@sdics.UUCP (Clydene Nee) writes: >However, if we want to talk about jokes lets discuss the PC jr. I happen to own a PCjr, and the only joke about it was the outrageously high price for a "home" computer. I got mine cheap, added the Racore expansion unit and now have 640 K with two disk drives. The PCjr is a very good machine. - it does not have DMA, but disk I/O is faster than any other PC or PC clone I have tried, though I don't know why. Only drawback is that you can't type during disk I/O. - keyboard is compact. All the keys are there, and they are all full size, but the keyboard takes about half the space (Admittedly, the original chiclet keyboard was a joke) - with the Racore extended memory, programs actually run FASTER on a PCjr than they do on a PC. The PC uses wait states, the PCjr does not when running in the top 512K. The bottom 128K is a different story since the video circuit gets every other cycle. Still only about 10% slower than a PC there though. - better graphcis than a standard CGA, although completely downward compatible. Hi-res mode gives 640 x 200 in 4 colours, not just two. I have used the PCjr for some serious development, and my only complaint is the lack of a hard disk, although hard disk interfaces are becoming available. IBM made several mistakes with the jr (price, original keyboard, original limit of 128K), but their price reductions, new keyboard, peripherals and extra memory and third party products make it the best bargain around. Too bad they don't make them anymore.