SHULMAN@sdr.slb.COM (Jeffrey Shulman) (08/15/87)
Date: Fri 14 Aug 87 19:07:52-GMT
From: Jeff Shulman <SHULMAN@SDR>
Subject: Delphi Mac Digest V3 #38
To: Delphi-List: ;
Message-ID: <555962872.0.SHULMAN@SDR>
Mail-System-Version: <VAX-MM(218)+TOPSLIB(129)@SDR>
Delphi Mac Digest Friday, August 14, 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 38
Today's Topics:
RE: 800K drive problems
RE: Usenet Mac Digest V3 #58
John Sculley Keynote Speech
RE: TOPs and pcs and macs and vaxes and (2 messages)
Jean-Louis Gassee Keynote Speech
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From: DEDHED
Subject: RE: 800K drive problems (Re: Msg 21779)
Date: 11-AUG 11:43 Hardware & Peripherals
ptr,
The reason for not wanting the heads together during long periods of
time is that it may allow condensation to develop between the surfaces,
especially if the unit is being transported between temperature
extremes. When said condensation evaporates, any dissolved/suspended
matter would then be on the heads.
Mike
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From: DDUNHAM
Subject: RE: Usenet Mac Digest V3 #58 (Re: Msg 21764)
Date: 9-AUG-22:00: Network Digests
>when using the old MFS, the "get file" dialog box shows you ALL
>of the files on the MFS volume? This old "feature" would be
Doesn't sound too practical too me...my hard disk has 1554 files, and
creating the list of names would take many K. Could I suggest my
Findswell system extension as an easier solution for finding files than
DAs? (Findswell is available from Working Software.) It adds a Find
button to all Open dialogs.
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From: PEABO
Subject: John Sculley Keynote Speech
Date: 11-AUG 18:45 Business Mac
This is a report on the Tuesday keynote speech at the Macworld Expo.
John Sculley spoke for about 45 minutes and then took questions from the
audience. This report was prepared by Peter Olson (PEABO on DELPHI) and
any inaccuracies are due to my transcription of the substance of the
speech, which I have done in my own words to a large extent (I'm not a
stenographer!). If you would like to post this or reprint it, please do
so in its entirety.
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John was introduced by Pat McGovern of IDC, parent corporation of PC
World Communications. Pat mentioned that it is his 50th birthday, and
John Sculley's 50-month "anniversary" as the head of Apple Computer. He
went on to describe his first view of the Macintosh, in the fall of
1983, which led to the startup of Macworld magazine, and then gave a
plug to his new publication Macintosh Today which has its premiere issue
at the Expo. He wound up his introduction by mentioning that Sculley
will have a book published in October by Harper and Row, entitled "The
Oddessey", and by praising Sculley as the man who turned Apple around
from the company that the press was ready to write off in 1985 to the
company it is today, a forerunner in the world of modern personal
computing.
John Sculley then took the podium. He says that in fact, it is not the
work of one man making Apple what it is today, but actually the work of
many people, both inside and outside Apple. The future depends on the
gathering together of a critical mass of computers in the hands of
people who use them for interpersonal computing. Computers will be
integrated into the workplace and the schools, connecting people to
people, and connecting people to information. Developments in artifical
intelligence will pave the way for contextual analysis of that
information. People will have at their fingertips sophisticated tools
for managing information, and this will change the way people think and
learn.
Information is displacing natural resources as a dominant factor in the
economy of the world. Up to now, we have seen a hierarchical economic
system, where raw materials from third world countries are imported into
the US and other developed countries, and made into products of greater
value, both for our own use and also for export back to the same
countries which provided the raw materials. But now that is shifting,
and instead of the hierarchy, we are seeing a network of
interrrelationshsips taking its place. The affluent middle class can no
longer be the epicenter. It is an ecosystem of a kind, and a seemingly
small change in one area can have an enormous effect on the whole (John
illustrated his point with a comment about the effect of deforestation
of the Amazon on the production of oxygen in the atmosphere). The small
change that is going to effect our future is the fact that we, the
affluent middle class, have been living beyond our means, and we must
figure out how we can continue to create value as an affluent middle
class society.
We need to create value on the basis of ideas, new paradigms of thinking
and communication. The central core of the world economy is at risk,
and we need innovation based on powerful ideas. "Changing the world" is
NOT just a figure of speech!
It may appear that IBM and Apple are now on the same path, since IBM has
finally embraced the world of graphic interfaces and even ships a
"pointing device" with their new machines (they don't call it a mouse,
you see) [laughter from the audience]. And yes, it will now be easier
for the two environments of IBM and Apple to coexist, but Sculley
predicts that in a few years, people will see that IBM and Apple are
still on two different paths, just as they have been in the past. By
the year 2000, the desktop engine will be capable of 100 million
instructions per second (the Mac II tips the scale at 2 MIPS and the Mac
Plus is about 0.5 MIPS). Telecommunication and personal computing will
have converged, and AI will have progressed. Apple's focus is to bring
this technology to the people, and to follow the natural progression
from the mainframe as the epicenter of computing power, through to the
network (just becoming dominant today), and all the way to the
individual's personal computer. In the world of the future, mainframes
will make excellent peripherals for personal computers!
To understand the difference between IBM and Apple, all you have to do
is see how the two companies will develop their systems for this future.
IBM will have the PS/2 talking to every computer IBM makes, but the
PS/2 will always be the peripheral. But for Apple, the personal
computer is the epicenter and the mainframe is the peripheral. So the
vision of these two companies will continue to keep them on separate
paths.
Apple appeals to the artists. Apple's role will be to provide a
technology platform. Third parties will implement the tools to bring
this technology to the people. For example:
* One of the new products at the show is a FAX modem operating at 9600
bps, allowing Macs to communicate via facsimile or to connect to
conventional FAX devices.
* EtherTalk on the Mac II will make the Mac II a real workstation machine.
* AppleShare PC will allow IBM PCs to participate in Apple workgroups.
John mentioned some figures on Mac networking, saying that Apple
estimates there are now 130,000 AppleTalk networks containing over
400,000 nodes.
One of the important aspects of interpersonal computing is the ability
to open multiple windows and work with them concurrently, some of which
are related to applications running in your Mac, and some of which may
be tied through a network to information on someone else's Mac.
Naturally, this cannot be done without some form of multi-tasking, so
Apple is announcing MultiFinder, its first generation multi-tasking
operating system. MultiFinder was designed for the Mac II, but runs on
the Mac Plus and Mac SE as well. It will allow mutliple windows from
different applications on the screen at once, and will have background
printing. Soon there will be background communication and file
processing available from third parties. MultiFinder works the way
people do, and has fast context switching, integrating information
across multiple Macs, and even across multiple operating environemnts,
such as the Mac 286 coprocessor. MultiFinder will be shipping is
September, so you will be able to use it in 1987 [unlike the
multitasking for the IBM PS/2].
John then went on to talk about an even more exciting new product, which
dates back nearly two years when Apple Fellow Alan Kay convinced him to
look at a new project from another Apple Fellow, Bill Atkinson. That
work has blossomed into the HyperCard product which Apple will be
shipping in a few weeks. HyperCard is an extension of Macintosh
technology which is probably the most exciting thing since the Macintosh
itself. It is a new medium which will revolutionize the use of personal
computers. It opens software in a fashion analogous to the way a Mac II
opens the hardware. It provides a personal toolkit of snap-together
parts called "stackware". Just like the Mac provides a way to use
computers without intimidation, HyperCard provides a way to organize
information in an associative, natural manner. Stacks of cards are used
as a metaphor to tie together text, pictures, and sound allowing you to
jump between ideas much as you would think to yourself "That reminds me
of ..." -- HyperCard is a kind of database, but not like any
conventional database you have ever seen.
Because Bill Atkinson is an old hand at writing super-optimized code,
HyperCard can do these things quickly as well as elegantly. It's a
great organizing tool for people who never can figure out where to file
things. Eventually, it may be used as a front end for the massive
databases which can be put on CD-ROMs. Although HyperCard is a
programmable medium, the emphasis is on the content, not the
programming.
HyperCard will be bundled in with all new Macs shipped, and will be sold
along with a large amount of example stackware for just $49 to anyone
who has already bought his Mac. Apple wants to see a large installed
base for this product grow rapidly.
The Mac II is a brand new center of gravity. All you have to do is look
on the exhibit floor at new products such as VersaCAD (a 2-D CAD
system), large screens and accelerator cards. Hewlett-Packard has a new
line of scanners and printers that are compatible with the Mac, proving
that some very large companies have joined the ranks of Apple
developers. Apple will continue to lead the way in desktop publishing,
but will also be expanding into a variety of other personal productivity
markets.
Everyone involved with the Mac can take personal pride in having turned
the Macintosh into what it is today. The Mac evokes a passion in its
users and its developers, and it is spreading world wide. Thank you.
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John then took questions from the audience:
Q: Will Apple be doing something to provide for network management?
A: Yes, both Apple and third parties will be providing management tools.
Q: Will Apple be manufacturing a "mainframe peripheral" as you put it in
your speech?
A: We'll leave that to the third parties. [laughter from the audience]
Q: What about graphics boards such as the high-performance engines from
Silicon Graphics?
A: I don't know what we'll see in that area just yet.
Q: How long to you intend to continue at Apple?
A: The journey has just begun.
Q: How well has Apple been doing in the Japanese market?
A: For 8 years nobody knew we were there, and we were losing money. Then
we developed the first western personal computer with kata kana to kanji
translation in ROM and became an instant overnight success, and this has
continued for the past year and a half.
Q: What about the memory required for multi-tasking?
A: Multi-tasking does require large memories. While Apple will continue
to sell one and two megabyte machines, we think that most Mac IIs will be
configured with 4-5 megabytes. That's why we are using the SIMM strips in
our memory designs.
Q: What about support for 512K Macs that were gotten with difficulty into
corporations "through the back door"?
A: Well, realistically you can use these Macs in a traditional fashion, but
you really are missing a lot of the power of a Macintosh if you don't
upgrade them.
Q: What is Apple's view of the engineering market?
A: We are not that interested in the engineering market of today, since it
is still a small market. What we are interested in is the opportunity we
have to break it wide open like we did with desktop publishing. We will do
that with productivity tools, and with AU/X, which is UNIX with Apple's user
interface.
------------------------------
From: METASOFTWARE
Subject: RE: TOPs and pcs and macs and vaxes and (Re: Msg 21557)
Date: 12-AUG 10:45 Hardware & Peripherals
so we've got 35 macs on appletalk, about 10 PC on appletalk via TOPS and
this whole mess connected to our SUN via ethernet (thin-net), and
everyone is happy. the SUN connection software isn't wholly there yet.
we can can up a SUN process (eg: login) and have the mac do FTP
transfers, but there's more software somewhere which we're trying to
get. the MAC side of the TOPS network is fairly robust, except that
there's a multi-user bug that was dicovered by MDA, OMNIS & TOPS which
is fixed with TOPS version 7.22 (??). the PC side has some unpleasant
crashable type bugs, but if you don't absolutely rely on it it will
serve you ok. the connection between SUN & appletalk is the Kinetics box
Fastpath-3. nice piece of engineering. -alan
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From: PEABO
Subject: RE: TOPs and pcs and macs and vaxes and (Re: Msg 21834)
Date: 13-AUG 00:42 Hardware & Peripherals
The new TOPS supports TCP/IP (I don't have the details at my fingertips,
but you might want to give Centram a call next week).
peter
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From: PEABO
Subject: Jean-Louis Gassee Keynote Speech
Date: 12-AUG 17:47 Business Mac
This is a report on the Wednesday keynote speech at the Macworld Expo.
Jean- Louis Gassee spoke for about an hour. This report was prepared by
Peter Olson (PEABO on DELPHI) and any inaccuracies are due to my
transcription of the substance of the speech, which I have done in my
own words to a large extent (I'm not a stenographer!). If you would
like to post this or reprint it, please do so in its entirety.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Since Jean-Louis Gassee needs no introduction, he didn't get one (Only
kidding! Mitch Hall did say a word or two before bringing Jean-Louis on
stage).
The title of Jean-Louis' speech was "Personal Computers: Are We There
Yet?". He began by commenting about how, when things are going well as
they are for Apple right now, there is always the danger of complacency.
Apple would like to avoid falling into that trap! Yes, although
personal computers are now far from perfect, there are a number of
things we have been doing right, and these point out the direction for
growth in the future. What do we have to do to fuel innovation?
I think that personal computers are still too hard to use. Let me
illustrate by taking an observation from Stewart Alsop, that there are
there are perhaps 50, 000 people "in the industry". Beyond that, we
have several hundred thousand people who are enthusiasts, and maybe 10
million other users of personal computers. And there are many more
children who are 4-5 years old. If computers did what we would like
them to be able to do, these children would be able to use the computers
too, even before becoming literate in the ordinary sense. Using a
keyboard is a wonderful thing for a small child, to be able to push on
the keys and have things happen, and it produces a sense of
exhiliration.
But right now, using computers takes too much knowledge and time.
Beyond the 10 million users there are in America alone 200 million other
people who are not users of computers. The personal computer is
destined to be the magic telephone or magic book, but today too many
computers are tied up into very limited uses, constructed with canned,
rigid applications for clerical cattle! (You think I am being
excessive?) In some companies, people are given locked templates for
spreadsheets from their MIS departments and are forbidden to make
changes or create their own. What we need is to be able to use these
tools in a non-predetermined fashion.
Think for a moment about how cars are more expensive than personal
computers, but the market for cars is much larger than the market for
computers. The 'car' user interface is one where much of the knowledge
is built into the car, not into the head of the person who is driving
it. In contrast, our computers ( which are our intellectual vehicles in
the universe of knowledge), still require a great deal of knowledge in
the head of the user, and this is why we are still talking about System
Files and folders. The Macintosh user interface is the beginning of
putting more knowledge into the computer, since we have the direct
manipulation of the graphic metaphor with less encoding and decoding
required just to make the computer work. I am not suggesting that
everything can or should be reduced to a black box; we have learned from
the experience of the original closed Macintosh. We need a layered
approach, where the ordinary user can feel comfortable manipulating the
computer but the advanced user can still get inside and get into the
technical aspect of things.
Pointing to the future, we see we have feedback between two radically
different engines: we have the unforgiving, hard, binary logic of the
computer; and we have the crazy, illogical thinking of humans. What
humans can do is to draw effective conclusions (not necessarily logical
conclusions) from fuzzy data. Intelligence in humans lets us take a
concept, and perform elastic deformation upon it, to produce another
concept, or link between two ideas. But the artificial intelligentsia
who are trying to make a computer think like a human are having a hard
time with this, except in very limited areas such as the chess playing
programs. And the systems we have made which are easy for the machine,
such as the hierarchical card catalog of the library, do not correspond
with how people actually think. The computer should instead replicate
and follow your thinking process.
Why is Apple's new product HyperCard so important? One way to look at
HyperCard is as the stack of cards, but this is only the most limited
way to think of it. Now for the first time, a personal computer has
built into it an object oriented language. This is the next step beyond
BASIC and Pascal in the evolution of personal computers. With BASIC and
Pascal there is a large amount of knowledge which must be mastered in
order to program. But real people will be able to program in HyperTalk!
(Yes, and "programmers" will be able to use it too!) HyperTalk provides
a smooth enough path to any degree of complexity you want to take it.
Recently I have been on a sabbatical, and I have had time away from the
meetings and demands of business to do some hacking around with
Macintoshes and a LaserWriter, and to play with these new tools.
HyperCard, I believe, will be even better than Apple thought it would
be. And you hard-core C programmers will be able to get into it just
like machine language programmers have always been able to extend the
functions of Applesoft using the ampersand function to escape into your
subroutines.
I want to talk about databases now. You know that very few people are
able to use Dialog (I apologize to anyone in the audience from Lockheed,
it is not a fault particularly of that one system). Today's database
systems have a very sovietic user interface; I imagine it to have been
written by the KGB so as to keep people from getting into the data! We
could imagine instead a kind of pyramid, in which the tip of the pyramid
is an index in HyperCard which knows something about the data beneath
it, and which can assist you in your browsing (even before you connect
to the database) to think of the right way of phrasing your question
that you didn't realize beforehand.
It is the Mac user interface, and extensions to it, and the smooth
access provided by HyperTalk which points in the direction to the
future.
Now, before we get the idea that everything is easy, let's talk about
the obstacles. There is always resistance to change, which I think of
as the "corporate immune system" at work. Now, 3-1/2 years after the
Mac was introduced (and now that we have built it up from its 128K
beginnings), very few people question what the Mac is. The consistency
of the Mac is just like the knowledge that is stored in the car; you
don't have to remember so much to use one Mac application and then
another. This will only get better because of Juggler [MultiFinder]
because the applications which conform to the standard interface will
integrate well and others which may not will be very noticeable. Now
imagine if we wanted to make a more efficient, rational car, different
from the designs we have now. All the gauges could be in the center near
the stick shift, and the stickshift could be like a joystick and moving
forward would accelerate and moving to the left or the right would steer
the car. Why not have a car like this, which a person in either front
seat could drive? It is technically possible. In computer terms,
perhaps an analogy is to the use of the QWERTY keyboard. Now, are we
[Apple] going to lead a movement to change the keyboard? No, I don't
think so! We are already in enough trouble because of the mouse! And a
one-button mouse at that! (I want you to think for a moment, by the
way, about what will happen when instead of a mouse, we start using a
stylus. Those people who think the mouse should have three buttons will
need to take saxophone lessons! [laughter from the audience]).
Another thing I am worried about personally is literacy. Too much of
today's education is centered around the belief that the student is a
kind of vessel into which the educational system will pour knowledge,
and the student quite naturally is rebellious because of this. In the
entire western world, there is a trend towards a decrease in literacy.
One thing we often blame is TV, since TV is in the business to prevent
us from having to think. (Now this is not always bad; I know I
sometimes like to relax in front of the set to get my mind off my work.)
The other thing besides TV is the fact that technology has made our
lives easier, easier to live a homeostatic life, just maintaining body
temperature (but what about poetry?) Technology is smoothing our access
to the things we want out of life, and this is creating a chasm between
the knowledge haves and have-nots. And it is paradoxical that even
though you would think that the people who have the worst jobs should be
compensated for their extra burden, the fact is that it is the people
with the most interesting jobs who get paid the most. It is not what
you would call fair.
This will continue to be a widening gap: unless we do something such as
applying computers to the problem we will find ourselves in an
intellectual South Africa.
And finally, I want to talk about government. You may find this
paradoxical, since I am a believer in the free market and so on, but I
am very troubled by some of the "deregulation" that is going on now.
Think of how the interstate freeway system has contributed to the growth
of transportation in this country. Well, I don't see the corresponding
"data freeway" being put into place here. The Europeans and the Japanese
know very well the value of efficient transport of information. A
computer which does not have a memory cannot be intelligent, and access
to databases is necessarily a part of the computer with a memory. I
know one country by the end of this year will have universal access to
electronic mail through X.400 standards. It may be that not everyone
will make use of this, but the capability will be there to communicate
with anyone in that country electronically.
ISDN and the personal computer will be able to change the way we
compute, since we will be able to do real-time graphics, or fake local
editing (there will be no need for arcane commands to fix a
typographical error you see three lines above in your typing).
So what should we do in reality? (Coming to the Expo is in some sense a
vacation from reality for most of us.) Apple feels that this is the
time when we must be very careful to keep our eye on the ball. Don't
lose track of what we have been trying to do. Software is fragile, and
it would be easy to get off the track. We have to keep improving. For
example, installing DAs and Fonts into the System file is really an
unsatisfactory way of doing things. An improvement which might seem
mundane is actually as noble as creating a new CPU, because creativity
does not strike in designated plans. What we might find more difficult
to think about is how we can prevent the corporate immune system from
preventing the flourishing of new ideas. We must keep open to
innovation.
We cannot lose sight of the goal of creating ultimate simulation tools.
There are plenty of things we would like to do which we don't presently
have the tools to do. For example, I would like to design a house, and
since I live in California, I would like my architectural design program
to know about the styles of building appropriate for this climate, and
to know about zoning regulations in my area, and building codes. This
could be programmed inside, but I think is better handled by the program
being able to access a database somewhere, without my having to know the
details of how the database might be organized and what commands to use
to obtain the information. I don't think we will see this in the next 5
years, because the best CAD/CAM programs today don't have the compute
power, or the understanding (in the artificial intelligence sense), and
in particular, do not have access to the data freeways necessary to get
to the data they would need.
Well that is enough for today, I see our panel for the next discussion
would like to convene. I want to thank all of you who are using the
Macintosh, and the third party developers who have made such wonderful
products for us, for making the Macintosh the success it is.
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End of Delphi Mac Digest
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