rej@cornell.UUCP (Ralph Johnson) (02/04/84)
From: rej (Ralph Johnson)
To: net-micro
Subject: Some Real Info on the Mac
There has been a lot of comments and requests for info on the Macintosh,
so I will answer some questions and give my opinions. I will not answer
questions like "What does it look like?", because it should be easy to find
out. Take a field trip to your local Apple dealer. Every Apple dealer in
Ithaca, including the one that is a hi-fi store, has a Mac on display, and
even someone trained in using them. In addition, my February Byte that
arrived yesterday had several good articles on it.
I never saw a Mac until a week or so ago. Since then I have spent some
time reading the documents for developers, so I have gotten a good feel
for what can be done with it and what it is good for. However, I am not
an expert, so please take what I say with a grain of salt.
First of all, the Mac, though new, is scarcely untested. Apple has done
one of the most superb jobs of keeping a secret that I have ever seen. They
have had Macs in-house for at least a year, and a software developer in
Ithaca had one 6 months ago. Apparently the software has undergone a number
of changes, so they have fixed the bugs, and bugs in the fixes, and so on.
Note that the people who have had first crack at the Mac are experienced, so
they could live with the problems of a not-completely-debugged system.
However, it seems likely that the Mac will have much fewer problems than most
new systems.
The second argument as to why the Mac is not untested is that it is really an
improved and stripped down Lisa. Much of the software is the same, especially
the remarkable graphics package. Apple learned that some of the things that
they did on the Lisa were wrong, so they did them right the second time. They
are also upgrading old Lisas to the Lisa-2. (The Lisa-2 can run Mac programs,
the Lisa cannot.) The Mac is the low end of a line that runs up through the
Lisa family - it is not a unique product.
The Mac is not designed for programmers. It is designed for people who use
programs written by others. Therefore, any argument by a programmer that
they don't need ease of use is specious. If you really want to find out how
well designed it is, ask your mother, your boy friend, or your boss. As
someone who has spent a lot of time trying to keep people from misusing
computer systems, I think that the Mac will be a great success. Computers
ARE hard to learn how to use. Just because I find them easy to understand is
no reason to think otherwise.
There are a lot of programs to help develop software for the Mac.
Unfortunately, most of them run on the Lisa. There is an enhanced Pascal
(i.e. Pascal with classes) that is used for most of the development work. It
would seem easy to port it to the Mac, since the Mac is so much like the
Lisa. However, a hard disk and more memory is needed for real development
work, and a Mac with a hard disk and more memory is called a Lisa-2.
I am probably exagerating here, as the two machines probably have different
cases, and the Lisa-2 runs a multi-process operating system.
The amount of software that is built into the Mac is amazing. The operating
system, graphics software, window software, event manager, even a text
editor; all are in the 64K ROM. The Apple people all seem to be pretty
impressed by the quality of the software in the ROM, especially the graphics
package. From what I can see, they have reason to be.
The principle advantage of having all this common software is that it will
ensure a common user interface for all programs. Essentially the entire user
interface is in ROM. You can write your own, of course, but it would be
stupid to do so. By using the Mac software you save time, make a program
that is easy to learn to use, and make a program that fits well with other
Mac programs.
The Mac will lend itself well to developing integrated systems. The
"scrap-book" can be used to transfer information from one program to another.
We will see how well this works out in practice.
One complaint that I have is that the Mac operating system only runs one
application at a time. Thus, to transfer data from one type of file to
another, you have to open one file, move data to the scrapbook, open the
other file, and put it in. Going from one file to another will cause a
program to be read in. I suppose that, since the Mac only has 128K, it is
not a bad compromise. However, Apple plans to use the 256K chips as soon
as they can get millions of them a year. This will increase memory to 512K,
room for several applications. Although a single application can use several
processes (actually, simulate several processes, it is fairly complicated)
it does not seem possible to start up one process which receives mail from
the net, puts it in the mailbox, and notifies me of mail, all while I am
running the text editor. If anybody out there knows how to do this, please
let me know.
Lot of universities will be getting Macs. I saw a list of twenty or so,
mostly big schools. Cornell will get several million dollars worth over
the next couple of years. We expect to have a large number by fall
(50? 100?) and use them for the introductory programming classes. In a
year or two we will probably use them for most programming classes. While
the programming languages that run on the Mac may not be suitable for writing
systems software (they are all, to my knowledge, interpreted) they will be
more than adequate for beginning programming. We are planning on having
systems programming languages in the not-too-distant future.
Before I close, I would like to say a few words about Xerox. All the major
ideas used in the Lisa and the Mac were developed at Xerox PARC. After Xerox
proved that they would not develop a product properly (i.e. the Star, which
was fine technology, but was not sold correctly) Apple won away some of their
best people with promises of being part of designing something that would be
USED. (After working on my thesis for awhile, I understand how they felt.)
The technical people at Apple always acknowledge Xerox as the original source
of their technowlogy, but you never hear a word about it in any of the
promotional literature. I just wanted to set the record straight.
I would not buy a Mac for myself. However, I would love to have a Lisa-2/10.
I would seriously consider a Mac for my wife or daughter. The Mac will be a
good machine to write applications for, but not as good for development.
The Mac will be a winner. Once the software is available, it will be years
ahead of the PC. The software will be available soon, since it is much
easier to program than other machines, and because lots of people have been
working on software for it. Therefore, I predict that the Mac will do well,
that Apple will get even richer, and that the only reason to buy an IBM is
(as usual) for the name.
Ralph Johnson rej@cornell (ARPA)
{allegra,decvax,ihnp4,uw-beaver,etc.}!cornell!rej