rf@wu1.UUCP (02/17/84)
In answer to Mats Wichman (dual!mats):
What strikes me is that we have the potential for a real
impressive intelligent terminal here. Has anyone thought of
doing for the Macintosh what Bell did for the BLIT?
And in answer to ? (vaxine!ptw):
Q: Will there be an external hard disk for Mac, or is the
disk port too Sony?
Q: Who is working on Un*x for Mac? A Blit emulator Mac?
In an interview Stephen Jobs of Apple said that Apple may
provide Unix workstation capability for the Macintosh. He also
mentioned a "disk server" -- a hard disk with a file mangament
software connected to a Macintosh network.
Possibly a "network computer" similar to the Sun Microsystems
and Cadmus products is in the works. Un*x for a stand alone
Macintosh is unlikely -- while a Macintosh is a fine personal
computer, the Macintosh hardware is unsuited to timesharing.
Randolph Fritz
Western Union Telegraphguy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (02/19/84)
> Possibly a "network computer" similar to the Sun Microsystems > and Cadmus products is in the works. Un*x for a stand alone > Macintosh is unlikely -- while a Macintosh is a fine personal > computer, the Macintosh hardware is unsuited to timesharing. So who said anything about "timesharing"? UNIX does timesharing well but it is available on a *number* of single-user machines, including (surprise, surprise) Sun and Cadmus (as well as IBM, remember?). The Macintosh hardware *is* unsuited to multitasking; I believe it doesn't have any memory mapping hardware (the 8086 family (N < 80286) sort of has it, so you can fake it well enough). Nor does the MAC have the hard disk that UNIX requires (because UNIX goes to the disk so often, because the standard V7 filesystem used by most UNIX implementations moves the heads too much, and because there's so *much* of UNIX that you'd have to wrap your floppy in duct tape before putting UNIX on it). Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy