🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

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.

One thing I don't know the answer to, though, is why the CMT System 7 
makes users wait for printing and disk formatting.  I'm sure it didn't 
have to.  Luckily I can print in the background and I rarely need to 
format floppies.  But it's still kind of annoying when everything stops 
if I click on a menu or on a window title bar or something.