🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rmcassid-2002961041560001@dante.eng.uci.edu>,
Robert Cassidy <rmcassid@uci.edu> wrote:
>In article <danpop.824477998@rscernix>, danpop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote:
>
>> In <4g00uj$gaq@nuke.csu.net> ghansen@isc.sjsu.edu (Gregory L Hansen) writes:
>> 
>> >In article <danpop.824304112@rscernix>, Dan Pop <danpop@mail.cern.ch> wrote:
>> >
>> >>My point was that even software written by Apple, even as part of MacOS,
>> >>has problems with CMT, so there is little wonder that other applications
>> >>have this kind of problems, as well.  It's easy to see why Apple is
>> >>moving towards PMT, but it's impossible to understand why it took Apple
>> >>so long. (Well, the reason is that the average Mac user thinks that
>> >>this is how computers are supposed to work and accepts all the crap s/he
>> >>gets.  The best example is offered by the Windows users, who accepted
>> >>the frequent crashes for the same reason.)
>> >
>> >I agree it's easy to see why Apple is moving toward PMT, and I wish 
>> >they'd started down that path years ago (although I didn't know the 
>> >difference a year ago).  But I think it's also pretty easy to see why 
>> >they didn't.  It involves rewriting the OS while maintaing backward 
>> >compatibility.  You see how long it's taking to get Copland out.  If they 
>> >had started this earlier, they probably wouldn't have finished before 
>> >they switched to the PowerPC line and would have had to start over again 
>> >anyway.  And if they had finished, what's the point of putting out new 
>> >software technology for a line of hardware they're about to drop?  And if 
>> >Copland was going to run on the PPCP, they sort of needed to finalize 
>> >that standard before they could finish the new OS.
>> 
>> You mean that Apple programmers are so incompetent that they're not able
>> to write code which can be easily migrated from one hardware platform
>> to another?  Linux was ported to a bunch of platforms and Apple is porting
>> it now to the PMac (they don't even seem to wait for the PPCP).  If this
>> was possible (so easily) with Linux (or *BSD), why do you think it would
>> be so difficult with software written by Apple's professional programmers.
>
>Perhaps you've given us the answer right there. Linux is being ported for
>3 models of Powermac. It won't work on the several dozen other models of
>Powermac. So much for easy migration. Part of the problems in recoding
>MacOS is that some parts are assembler written in 1983 by people that
>aren't in the company any longer. That code works great and is rarely used
>(like the floppy formatting code) so why fix it right away. It's not a
>matter of recompiling or cranking out a new driver here or there, but
>completely rewriting most of the OS. Ask the Win95 team how easy it is to
>just push the button and have it work.

This is precisely why they should have recoded the OS *early*...so
there would be less of an OS to recode.  Or they might have used
high-level coding techniques with hand-translation to low-level code
so that when it finally came time to code the entire thing in a
high-level language all the work would have been done.

In other words, they didn't have to use assembly hacker techniques.
:-)

>That early code was clearly not designed to be migrated. It was designed
>to work quickly and take up little space on limited hardware. They
>sacrificed portability for speed and size. What programmer hasn't done
>this? Apple's programmers were so incompetant that they shipped a GUI
>based OS on hardware so limiting that MS could only manage DOS. 

I doubt anyone would attempt to argue that MS's programmers were as
good as Apple's...:-)

>I wish I
>could be so incompetant. Had Apple written nice portable code back in
>'83-'87 then we wouldn't have a Mac to argue over. It's a Catch-22. Either
>they do the wrong thing and have a product to fix, or they do the right
>thing and go out of business. You pick.

I disagree.  Unix was written portably on a machine that had what, 1/4
or less the memory that was available to the MacOS team?  And that was
on a system where the OS itself had to reside in *RAM*.  And the
resulting system was used for ... of all things ... document
processing!

>> >I'm not saying that makes it all right, just that I'm not really 
>> >surprised it took that long to get PMT on a Mac.  But I do wonder why 
>> >Windows users haven't been able to enjoy PMT until the hybrid form of 
>> >Win95 came out.  Microsoft doesn't exactly have to deal with radically 
>> >changing hardware, you know.
>> 
>> Windows users had the choice between at least a dozen of OS's with PMT.
>> They could even run their Windows apps in a PMT environment, at least on
>> OS/2 and SCO.  The PMac users had MacOS as their only option.  Can you see
>> the difference?
>
>Sure. But since the *vast* majority of Intel users run Windows and not all
>of those other things I wonder what the value of that statement is. Either
>
>
>a) Wintel people, by and large, have been mistakenly pouring resources
>into Windows when some PMT OS should have been selected instead.
>
>b) Most people really don't care about PMT. It doesn't affect their life
>that dramatically.
>
>Personally, I vote for b. I don't think that 100 million Windows users are
>that stupid. Sure there are people on the Mac that would like PMT and have
>been denied. Nobody is arguing that. But have *most* people on the Mac
>been disappointed by Apple by not offering a PMT environment? No more than
>*most* people using computers today have been disappointed. Most people
>simply don't care. You and I do, sure. I'm willing to let PMT go for the
>other features that the MacOS has. PMT matters to me, but not as much as
>other things. It's a trade-off.

But *most* people on the PC weren't disappointed running DOS when they
could have been running something similar to MacOS (GEOS was around
back then, wasn't it?), either.  Similarly, most people weren't
disappointed that they were using horses and carriages when the
automobile was a relatively new development.  And were it not for the
high-visibility advertising that occurred for each new development,
we'd still be doing things the same old way.  In fact, most people
back in the early eighties weren't disappointed about not having a
computer *at all*, were they?

People are disappointed only when what they're using is somehow worse
than what they're *used* to using.  For improvements to become
popular, they have to be made highly visible, so that it becomes
*obvious* that what the person is used to isn't as good as what they
*could* be using.

PMT hasn't been advertised heavily.  People are unaware of the
benefits it can bring.  The same is true of memory protection.  People
are *used* to their systems crashing.  They think it's *normal*.
That's because, in their experience, it *is* normal...thanks to MS and
Apple, who would rather implement stupidities like Balloon Help (or,
in the case of MS, would prefer to do absolutely nothing at all)
rather than giving their users the best technology they can offer.

>I'd rather have Applescript than PMT. I'd rather have Appleguide than PMT.
>I'd rather have OpenTransport than PMT. You see 2 reasons why I use a Mac
>and one reason why I'm not disappointed by Apple not shipping a PMT OS by
>now. I could go on and on but perhaps you see my point.

Would you rather have balloon help tham PMT?  What about At Ease?  Not
all of the things that Apple has implemented have been important or
particularly useful, you know.

[much deleted]

>Keep that in mind, though. The top *three* OS's (DOS, Win, and MacOS) all
>suffered from all of the things you mention for years and years. Perhaps
>Apple and MS know a thing or two that you don't...

I would say this is true: they know how to milk customers out of the
most money with the least amount of effort.  MS is a *master* of this.


-- 
Kevin Brown                                     kevin@frobozz.sccsi.com
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