🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

>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?

Moreover, with SCO I was even able to run Windows 3.1 apps from my
non-intel workstation by telneting to the SCO box and starting the
Windows emulator there.  The SCO emulator is X-based, so I could get the
emulator window on my remote screen without any problems.

>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.  

Apple programmers didn't try very hard to get their software right.
If it was good enough for the average Mac user, it was good enough for
them, too.  The current state of MacOS (especially the idiocies and
machine code inherited from the 68K version) shows this very well.

Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: danpop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland