bskendig@spot.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig) (03/06/91)
In article <kscott.668233571@locke.mmwb.ucsf.edu> kscott@cgl.ucsf.edu (Kevin Scott) writes: >piper@s5000.rsvl.unisys.com (Piper Keairnes) writes: >>You can also PAY for the latest System 6.0.x release at your nearest >>Computerland. When you buy the upgrade, you are buying manuals, disks, >>registration, etc. Or, you can take in your old system disks (to show proof >>of ownership) and some blank disks and walk away with a free copy of the >>System release disks. Precisely. I don't think Apple will intentionally do anything to keep somebody who owns an Apple computer from getting System 7, but the manuals aren't free. (You could argue that Apple should distribute the manuals as, say, MacWrite files on disks, but the manuals are primarily for users who probably wouldn't know how to get at them on the disks in the first place.) >Good point. I would also add that even if apple doesn'tpost 7.0 right away,it >will be posting 7.01 shrtly after 7.0 comes out. There are bound to be a few >problems and apple will (as much as I like to bash apple, I must concede) try >and fix and distribute a new system. I consider the mac a hobby as well as a >research tool, but I am busy enough that I will not use 7.0 when it first >comes out becuase of the likely decrease in my productivity 7.0 would effect. >I will read the net to see, just in case it is particularly bug free. No. The whole reason Apple has gone to great pains to get three seperate prereleases of System 7 (a9, b1, b4) out to developers is that they want to avoid any fiascoes like System 6.0 brought them. System 7.0b1 hasn't crashed on me nearly as often as 6.0.7 did, and the bugs are being duly noted and repaired in each successive beta release. People from all corners of the Mac world are playing with the beta-copes right now, putting it through its paces, trying each of thousands of pieces of software with it. By the time 7.0 goes release, I think it'll be far, far more bug-free than anything else Apple's ever released before. System 7.0b1 is simply *incredible*. I'm running it on an old Mac SE right now, and I can honestly say that anyone who complains that it runs too slowly is full of hot air. There are things I just don't know how I ever lived without: you can open cdevs and DA's from the desktop, so you can tinker with them and decide whether or not you actually want to go to the trouble of installing them -- and installing _anything_ now, be it INITs or cdevs or fonts or drivers, is accomplished by just dropping them onto the System Folder; your machine will file them into their proper places automagically. The new look for the Finder is a godsend: you can give _any_ icon to _any_ file, folder, or volume by pasting it into the Get Info box, you can command-click on a window titlebar to get a pulldown menu of all windows above it in the folder hierarchy. And then the Chooser has lots of little features to it that make life heavenly -- and then there's Personal FileShare -- and then -- too much to go on! System 7 takes some getting used to if you're a die-hard System 6 fan. (When I first saw 7.0a9, I thought it was too `cutesy'... ;) It does things slightly differently, and old habits die hard. But once you let it do things for you, you'll be an instant convert. Don't just assume it will be buggy and unproductive -- these people working on it are Geniuses with a capital G. << Brian >> | Brian S. Kendig \ Macintosh | Engineering, | bskendig | | Computer Engineering |\ Thought | USS Enterprise | @phoenix.Princeton.EDU | Princeton University |_\ Police | -= NCC-1701-D =- | @PUCC.BITNET | "It's not that I don't have the work to *do* -- I don't do the work I *have*."