🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22438@ut-emx.UUCP> chari@ut-emx.UUCP (Christohpher M. Whatlyey)
 writes:
>Well. From "real-world" experience, I can tell you that people who find 
>the Macintosh puzzling get along rather well on the NeXT. 

Don't fool yourself.  From "real-world" experience, I can tell you
about quite a few people who find the NeXT interface confusing,
inconsistent, arbitrary, gratuitously incompatible, and suffering from
an excess of design philosophy.  It doesn't mean either side is right,
it just means that I know different people.

>It is just so simple to use. Use effectively, is what I meant to say.
>I'd love to take two people who are as technology ignorant as say my
>father or my roomate and sit them both down in front of a Mac II and a
>NeXT. I can tell you that whoever is on the NeXT will get their
>document out faster.

If that's the sole test of ease-of-use, you may be right.  If that
person sits down *cold* at a NeXT, with nothing on the dock and the
browser in its default mode, it may be ten minutes before they *find*
the word processor, let alone print a document.  Don't scoff, I've
seen it happen.  I'd love to run your Mac vs. NeXT test, and, unlike
you, I have no idea how it would come out.  I've worked with a lot of
Mac novices, and I've watched a lot of people sit down at our
semi-public NeXT and try it out.  I still don't know which way the
frog will jump.

>Really, my roomate is one of the most ignorant people you could find
>when it comes to computers and he uses WriteNow, PrintManager, Webster
>Librarian and Quotations quite effectively. He never asks questions and
>he never complains. He cannot use a Mac and Word. Period!

You stacked that deck.  Word is not the easiest word processor for the
Mac, nor is it the default (nor does it pay more than lip service to
the Mac user interface guidelines).  Put WriteNow on both machines and
try again.  The naive-user friendliness of both machines is fairly
equal; where I see the NeXT's *potential* is in supporting users who
are no longer naive.

>What on earth are you talking about? The only time I find my NeXT slow
>is when I happen to be taking in stuff at 19.2k over the modem
>and unbatching news onto an optical when I'm trying to do something else.
>Text scrolling is faster than IIcis I have used for sure. And disk access.
>Don't even try to argue that one.

(aside: why not? was that intended as a formal proof?)

As a dissenting voice, I find my NeXT quite pokey at times.  Context
switching can be tedious, application launch is sluggish, printing (to
a NextLaser) makes the machine nearly unusable for the duration
(although I did like the 0.9 feature of being able to stop printing
indefinitely by rapidly moving a window), logging in takes a while,
and booting, even with the usually-reliable fsck-skip, is slow.
Performance is improving, but it ain't there yet.  Dropping in an
extra four meg would speed things up, but again, that's stacking the
deck.

  When the NeXT is *finished* (a date I've arbitrarily set at October,
1990), things may be different, but right now, you're talking about a
machine that's at the evolutionary level of a 128K Mac in 1984.  When
the NeXT-equivalent of a Mac+ comes out, we'll talk (that is, a Mac+
at the time it came out, not the low end of the family as it is now).


				"Sure, you can optimize the hell out
				 of Fortran, but optimized spaghetti
				 is still only lasagna."
--
J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)