mike%rice@sri-unix.UUCP (02/02/84)
From: Mike Caplinger <mike@rice> Well, one of these things has shown up here on campus; we are one of the schools in the Apple Consortium and have large student and faculty discounts. I managed to glom onto the demonstration machine for a few hours. First off, it's not an optical mouse as has been stated, but a rubber-ball mouse much like the Lisa's. Enough has been said about the software already; MacWrite is easy enough to use but rather limited in some ways (for example, footnotes are pretty much impossible), and the rulers for format control are both nice and clumsy; I think I would get used to them, and found myself going pretty fast towards the end. One problem is that while menus and selection bars are always present, often not all the options are selectable (they show up in grey rather than black when you can't use them); this introduces a slight amount of "modeiness", but it really isn't a problem. MacWrite is almost entirely mouse-based, using Xerox-style click-and-sweep for selecting regions, but it can also be used in a keyboard-oriented mode with a shift key (that has a kind of four-leaf clover on it; for lack of a better term, I've been calling it the "splat" key.) The disk stores 400K, of which about 100K is free once you have MacWrite, MacPaint, and the Finder (the visible part of the OS) on the disk. I believe it's possible to use multiple disks in a reasonable way; for example, I think it's possible to have documents on one disk and the system on another. They are working on both a double-sided disk and a second, external drive. Speed is not too bad. The screen updating is very fast, sometimes faster than the Sun Workstations we have locally. Switching between applications or documents is not blindingly fast, but is not too bad; in fact, it seems about as fast as the Lisa 1 I saw last year. Switching between fonts in MacWrite causes noticable disk delay, but it's nothing worse than using Mince (the Emacs clone which accesses the disk frequently) on a CP/M system, maybe better. The keyboard is a little mushy, but doesn't feel too bad. Sensitivity and auto-repeat time can be adjusted. The key placement is a bit odd for a computer. I suspect it tries to conform to the bogus ISO standard. The Imagewriter printer has twice the resolution of the screen, so printing expands each screen pixel to four printer pixels. This causes the fonts to develop horrible jaggies. The print quality isn't that bad, but it's a major deficiency given the capability of the printer and should really be fixed. The software still has a few lingering bugs. I'm not sure whether there was still some beta-test code floating around on the demo disks or not. I had to reboot a couple of times (there's an external switch, mounted way back on the machine's left side, connected to the 68k's NMI pin.) If all else fails when trying to eject the disk, you have a hole in the front you can stick a paper clip into to eject it. All in all, it's a slick machine and a very nice piece of work. The only software I saw was MacWrite and MacPaint; Multiplan was floating around, and I think everything else is still in testing. There should be a lot of them around here in 6 months.