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In article <1719@ssc-vax.UUCP> benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:

  .... ( deleted comments Byron Han made about multifinder )


>Still sounds awfully serial to me.  What happens if you have two windows
>at the top (i do this on a sun, usually two editting sessions) maybe
>different editors side by side...?  Your menu bar would be constantly 
>changing as you go back and forth (cutting and pasting)... (all that
>wasted mouse travel time and a wasted mouse click )
>I think context-sensitive menus make more sense (try SunView applications
>and see how well they work) :-) (Seriously, I think a menu bar starts
>making less sense in a multitasking environment were more than one 
>application is running at a time in a number of different windows )


	Multitasking saves the World!      Come on, the only person I know of
the can actually use two applications at once is Mr. Spock of Star Trek due to
the unique features of his Vulcan mind ( i.e. he is not a human being ).


       Unfortunately, us humans can only handle ONE high level cognitive task 
at once.  Therefore, we only need ONE menu at a time.  Anything above that is 
a nice HACK, but not all that useful for us mortals.  Needless to say, it 
ignores most of what about Human Computer Interaction.

 [ Like people operate best in a CONSISTANT environment which is why the Mac is
   so easy to learn and use. And UNIX is well UNIX ( a terrific puzzle, but not
   as great a tool as it could be. And why NeWS and X applications are often
   thought of as HACKS by people who did not 1) create, 2) pay for, or 
   3) forcibly made to use the application in the first place.                ]

	Think about it.  When have you ever seen anyone, including yourself,
doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing
something into your favorite editor ).  I give you a hint most computers I seen
have ONE keyboard per user.  This applies to general human behavior also. For
example, people can only handle one conversation at a time.  Some people can
easily and rapidly " task switch " from conversation to conversation ( doing
something remarkably similiar to a multitasking operating system ) but they
cannot do it in parallel.

	This is not to say multitasking is not useful.  Multitasking and 
timesharing used to mean just about the same thing.  Then came the single user
system.  It is useful on a single user system to run a BACKGROUND task(s) that
needs NO iteraction with the user, like laser printing a 50 page document. The
important point is that menus and the mouse and all that WIMPy stuff are for
INTERACTION with the human. WIMPy stuff is used by the human to directly 
controlthe program unlike the MS/DOS and UNIX environments with their prompts,
with which the program ask YOU the questions. The psychological types call this
User Directed Software.  Humans do not need to control background tasks that
is why they are background tasks.  If programs need to talk to other programs
THEY don't need the menu for hopefully they know what each are talking about 
 :-).

	As for your example of having two editors going at once.

	1) If this was two copies the SAME editor open on two different files
		then I would same that this is a malfunction of the EDITOR.
		Take a look at most Mac word processors; they have the
		capability of having multiple windows open at once.
		Even emacs has multiple buffers ( it user interface leaves
		something to be desired though )

	2) If you actually needed two DIFFERENT editors you hopefully were
		looking at two DIFFERENT types of files.  In this case you are
		context switching between two different types of data who 
		hopefully have completely different menus.  ( execpt for 
		the APPLE, FILE, and EDIT menus, there goes that CONSISANTCY
		again, Mac Write and Mac Paint have for the most part different
		menus and operation ( those probably aren't the best examples
		but you get the idea :-).



	To sum it all up multitasking means that can have more that one task
runnig at the same time ( more than one doing work FOR you ), but you can only
work WITH one application at a time.  So it looks SERIAL because people THINK
serial. We can only do low level tasks like see, hear, taste, and smell in
parallel; I guess that's what separates the humans from the computers who think
SERIALLY just like we do, only they're better at faking it.

P.S.  Apple I hope you keep this in mind while you are rewriting the MAC OS. We
	need enhanced MultiF not UNIX.  We already got UNIX. :-)

P.P.S. And yes the Mac interface isn't THE absolute best interface, but at 
	least its  tries.


Lyman S. Taylor					lyman@ames-aurora.arpa
NASA Ames Research Center		                or
						    more verbose
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