Re: Errors in a Microsoft Propaganda Book

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <uzFWh.1565$H_.847@newssvr21.news.prodigy.net>,
Joshua Bell <inexorabletash@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
>> "Windows" didn't really become the norm until bitmapped raster
>> graphics became common (that's why virtually all "windows" are
>> rectangular ;-).
>
> Even then, it's rather disturbing to look at prototype shells for the
> Macintosh:
>
> http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Early_Demos.txt
>
> Actually, most of folklore.org is fairly disturbing to me. When the Mac
> came out I was a wee lad of 10. The Mac was (seemingly) so radically
> different from the Apple II's we had at school. 68000 chips, a GUI, 3.5"
> drive, and so on. Relative to the II, the Mac seemed like something
> delivered by an advanced alien civlization.

I saw the Apple Lisa before I even had heard wbout the Macintosh.
Lisa too came with a 68K CPU, but used twin 5.25" floppy drives
instead of a 3.5" floppy drive.  The Lisa was also quite pricey,
consting about as much as 3-4 early Mac's or 8-10 Apple II's.

Of course the GUI was cute and fun -- but rather than something
"delivered by an advanced alien civlization" I felt the Lisa
was more like an "expensive playground".  Now, in hindsight, I
consider it more like a prototype of what was to come later, but at
that time it was quite useless -- not until the hardware speeds
had become several orders of magnitude faster did the GUI's become
enjoyable to work with.  Anyway, since I'm sort of a number crunching
buff, of course I ran a simple floating-point benchmark on that
early Lisa: with some help, I ran a loop doing some f.p. computations
in Lisa Pascal, and timed it.  Yes, I let the loop run a large enough
number of times for GUI overhead to become negligible... :-)  The
result wasn't particularly impressive: compared to Applesoft on an
unenhanced Apple II, the Lisa Pascal program ran some 30% *slower*.
Perhaps it was slow because it computed at a higher precision?
Unfortunately no ... Lisa Pascal computed to a precision of some
7 decimal digits, while Applesoft used some 10 decimal digits of
precision.  I was very unimpressed, and felt much more attracted
to the 8086/8088 with an accompanying 8087 numeric coprocessor,
and that's also the route I took when I later moved on from the
Apple II.

> Reading folklore.org many years later (and with a CS degree and
> industry experience under my belt), it finally hit me that the Mac
> really was just an incremental improvement over the Apple II that
> got *extremely* lucky - the daring move of no backward compatibility
> combined with about 5 deeply intertwingled strokes of genius
> (built-in monitor, standard mouse, bitmapped display, toolbox in ROM,
> high capacity floppies, elegant GUI design).
>
> The elegant GUI design is perhaps the truly distinguishing feature.
> IMHO, it wasn't until XP that Windows was actually in the running
> with the in pure visual style to the of the 1984 Mac... and I spent
> most of the last decade working for MSFT.

Both the PC and the Mac have improved over the years.  With the
introduction of OS-X, the Mac has *finally* got preemptive
multitasking and (through its Unix shell) also a decent CLI !!!!!
To me, that's more important than a cute GUI....

-- 
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