mo@seismo.UUCP (Mike O'Dell) (04/02/85)
Due to the noise on my phone line and corresponding misdesign of postnews, I inadvertently posted my 7300 review in an incomplete state. Herewith is the rest of it. --------------------------------------------------------------- While I have some problems with the window system as a window user on a Macintosh, there is probably a community which will find it attractive, if the performance problems can be remedied. As for the rest of the system, it seems pretty crisp running simple commands. I didn't try any cpu benchmarks, but if run as a single user (or even two user) timesharing system without the office system, it should work pretty well. Again, with the paging activity I observed, however, I wouldn't buy it with less than a megabyte, and again, the 20 meg disk is too small to last too long. It appears that someone has already started marketing a 40-meg upgrade, which should make it a very hospitable machine for 2 or even 3 people if they don't all do nroff's at once! All in all, a fairly credible 68K machine, but not the end of the world from a technical standpoint. Upon reflection, my original statement about being fairly unimpressed was correct - I wasn't particularly favorably impress, nor was I particularly unfavorably impressed. Of late, however, this last point is actually grounds to be favorably impressed! Lastly, keep in mind this assessment was based on about an hour of messing around without reading the manuals. But since I learned to use my Mac without reading anything (and knowing how to use Unix!), I sort of expect Window Systems to be that simple. If I were to use it longer, I suspect I would get used to its quirks and come to like it. But you better have a BIG desk if you want to make it a desktop! -Mike O'Dell
eric@osiris.UUCP (Eric Bergan) (04/03/85)
> Lastly, keep in mind this assessment was based on about an hour > of messing around without reading the manuals. But since I learned > to use my Mac without reading anything (and knowing how to use Unix!), > I sort of expect Window Systems to be that simple. If I were to use > it longer, I suspect I would get used to its quirks and come to like it. > But you better have a BIG desk if you want to make it a desktop! I also learned to use the system without the manuals (we got it before they were out), and didn't have any real problems (although there are a lot of shortcuts documented in the manuals). As for the size, I do have it on my desk (a rather small desk, at that), and don't really have a problem. It's footprint is about the size of any standard terminal these days. It is larger than a Mac, but then, the screen is also larger. The keyboard has many more useable keys than a Mac. And there are also expansion slots in the machine for future enhancements. It remains to be seen how much third party development of hardware will be done for the machine (although an Ethernet controller would be a logical addition). -- eric ...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!osiris!eric