Re: ------- Welcome to Macintosh --------

[gt2011a@prism.gatech.EDU (William Sheldon Simms)]

In article <C834Kz.CE7@news.cso.uiuc.edu> bazyar@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Jawaid Bazyar) writes:
>vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry) writes:
>
>>It must be pointed out that bad things came down from the Mac too.
>
>  Such as?  I'm at a loss. Unless you mean Apple's premium prices :)

He probably means the finder, or perhaps the whole GUI concept.
I am an Apple II user who is confortable with the Mac. Like you said
Jawaid, Apple made a business decision that we, as Apple II enthusiasts,
don't particularly like. However, from the point of view of Apple's bottom
line, it was probably the right one. John C. Dvorak wrote one of his columns
in PC Magazine about Lotus, in which he made an unpleasant comparison of
Lotus 123 to the Apple II. He basically said that both Lotus 123 and the
Apple II line were ancient pieces of crap (my paraphrase) and that Apple
made the right decision to dump the Apple II line and that Lotus should
dump 123, in favor of other piece of software that they have (I forget what
it's called). While I disagree with Dvorak's bad image of the Apple II, I
have to agree with his assessment that concentrating on the Mac was the right
thing for Apple to do. The money is in business computing and Apple wanted to
concentrate on where the money is. I think Apple would be far worse off today
if they had poured a lot of time and effort into maintaining the Apple II
line. As it is, Apple has gone a lot further to support the Apple II than
any other company has done with a "dead" computer. When do you think 
Commodore is going to be releasing the ethernet card for the VIC-20? Don't
hold your breath.

-Sheldon Simms

P.S.  Some people have been scoffing at the speed of Mac graphics. I must
admit I don't have a IIgs, so I haven't seen all the incredible demos and
other arcade games that are so much better than their mac counterparts, but
I do have an original Mac II with 16Mhz 68020, and I have some arcade games
that do direct writes to video memory and are incredibly fast (eg. Maelstrom
in 'super-funk' mode) and I also have some games which are mind-bogglingly
slow. (eg. Railroad Tycoon) I am convinced that the extreme slowness is
just a case of exceptionally crappy programming, like the game programmers
at Microprose who are used to 80x86 assembly and grokking the VGA registers
tried to write Railroad Tycoon for the Mac, and it was a little bit too much
of a conceptual leap for them.


-- 
W. Sheldon Simms         | Clarence / Newt / Rush   <- good guys
gt2011a@prism.gatech.edu |    Clinton / Lewis       <- bad guys
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AB A8 CD 87 89 B4 BC. BE A1 81 E5, C4 B1 97.