🚀 go-pugleaf

aberno@godel.questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Anthony Berno) writes:

>In article <1992Apr13.035754.11198@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip  
>McDunnough) writes:

>>And it's "most people" who
>> will determine the future. 

>There you have it folks. The future is DOS.

Jim Morris, the original leader of the Andrew project at CMU (before
that, he was at Xerox PARC) recently spoke at our Distinguished
Lecture series, and he made essentially that point.  I think he's
worth some attention, since Steve Jobs got a lot of ideas from PARC
(Macintosh==Alto) and Andrew (interpersonal computing).  I don't
agree with everything Morris said (he blamed virtual memory for
practically every performance problem including US Treasury bonds),
but an essential part of his talk was that: 1) the market drives
programmers, and 2) programmers will write programmer-productivity
tools, on whatever platform they're using.  Thus, the decision that
the Andrew project made, namely, to use workstations (for programmer
productivity), was wrong.  During the question period after the talk,
one CS professor concurred, pointing out that his experience teaching
an introductory course using Andrew was that the students who wrote
code on their PC's did substantially better work than those students
who used Andrew.

Don't get me wrong; I love my NeXT and wouldn't part with it.  But
Microsoft has an army of programmers writing standard applications.
I think they'll eventually adopt a lot of the software architecture
we see on the NeXT today.  And then they'll add an IB-like tool for
Windows, PC's will be the most attractive platform for custom
applications, and the dust will settle in Steve's sandbox, the PARC
of the 90's.

On the other hand, maybe Morris's analogy of computers and
refrigerators will hold: the home-appliances industry never fully
emerged from the 1930's depression; since everyone already had one
refrigerator, why get another?  Computers and the current {depr-,rec-} 
-ession could turn out the same.  Multimedia may never make it much
past the hype stage, except as entertainment technology. 
The future may be WordPerfect 6.0, Lotus 1-2-3 4.0, and Nintendo-586.

I hope I'm wrong, especially about the second scenario.

--
Derek_Beatty@cmu.edu	CS Grad Student		(412) 268-7898
CMU School of Computer Science, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pgh., PA 15217 USA