Re: Apple IIx

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Forrest <bctimes@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Supertimer wrote:
>
>> I'm not talking about the OS, as I said.  I'm talking about the
>> GUI.  This is the interface.
>
>Oops...
>It's the user experience (which includes but is not limited to
>the interface) that I was thinking of, and In The Beginning
>that was not good.  I just dug out my copy of DeluxeWrite -- it takes
>a full minute to launch from floppy, and that's with the P16 boot
>disk copied to /RAM5.  Performance is sluggish even with a ZipGS.

DeluxeWrite must be written poorly (like Medley).  Even a huge
program (by the standards of the day) like AppleWorks GS
becomes very snappy at 12.5Mhz on my TWGS enhanced unit
with 8MB of RAM.  I have 200+ TrueType fonts for AWGS and
still use the IIGS to do word processing and small page layout
tasks.  By the time GS/OS boots to the Finder and AWGS gets
launched and I create a new document on my IIGS, Windows 95
has yet to finish loading on my PC.  ;-)

Until you see the output of TrueType fonts using Pointless on
the same ink-jet or laser printer that your PC prints to, you may
not understand...but the fact is, the output using the same
TrueType fonts is identical from AWGS on the IIGS and from
the PC.  Of course output is not everything, the system has
to be reasonably fast to keep me interested.  But AWGS runs
as fast on my IIGS from the interface point of view as a word
processor on my Win 95 unit, thus I still use the IIGS along
with my PC.

>DW is copyright 1988, over a year after the IIgs release.  What
>were people running in the mean time?  I think Activision's Writer's
>Choice Elite came out in 1987, but that was even worse as I recall,
>with something like a ten-page limit on document size no matter how
>much memory you had.

AWGS 1.0 was released as a P16 program in late 1987.  It
was later made into a GS/OS program in AWGS 1.1 in 1989.
It allows documents as large as available memory.

So does WPGS, which was first released in early 1987 (just
a few months after the release of the IIGS) and runs respectably
fast even on a stock IIGS.  As fast as the Amiga version ran on
a stock Amiga 1000.  The interface was much better than the
Amiga version, of course.

>(At least System 3.2 had the Finder -- I just ran the DHR
>Apple II Desktop.  Yikes.  Looks like a monochrome Workbench.)

That's because Apple II Desktop is really a IIe program.  I
agree, Apple really goofed when they released that one.  I
would have rather they waited and not released it until the
real Finder came out.