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Matthew Kennel (mbk@caffeine.engr.utk.edu) wrote:
: Robert Cassidy (rmcassid@uci.edu) wrote:
: : In article <3v1tmf$f6u@sashimi.wwa.com>, blackbob@sashimi.wwa.com (G) wrote:
: :  
: : > I understand how small the Macintosh was.  Preemptive multitasking
: : > takes VERY little code.  The core routines are under a page long.
: : > All you need is a simple scheduler (VERY short), a switch routine
: : > (short), and set up the clock interrupt handler so it tells the
: : > scheduler that an application has taken up too much CPU time.  And
: : > you'd need a few tables to keep track of everything.  And the FS
: : > and some other things would be a tad bigger.  But not too much.

: : But compared to no scheduler, no switch routine, and no tables, that's a
: : lot of space.

: It's understandable it wasn't there in System 1, but it should have
: been at least thought about and there should have been a conceptual
: design for how to do it in the future.  Multitasking should have been
: there with System 4 and the SE, and memory protection by the first or second
: iteration of the '020 (or was it '030) that had VM hardware.



Now we're getting into the Steve Jobs Way: one user, one application, one 
CPU.

Ya gotta remember that Steve Jobs was/is somewhat obsessive. When Apple 
was trying to stretch itself beyond the Apple II mindset, Jobs was 
arguing that BASIC and assembler were all that Apple would need. A little 
known thing that Jef Raskin did was to convince Jobs to standardize on 
Pascal for all future Apple development. This was back in 1979. Jobs 
apparently obsessed on THAT issue also, and the company still hasn't 
managed to completely break free, even 8 years after Jobs left the company.


An interesting list of Steve Jobisms that he broke with when he founded NeXT:

Single User OS gave way to UNIX.
No cursor keys gave way to cursor keys.
No command line interface gave way to a CLI-capable system.
Pascal gave way to Objective C.


He left the company in the hands of Sculley, who was a much better 
business man.

Unfornuately, Sculley had been trained by Jobs, and had fully bought into 
the Steve Jobs Way of doing things, and never noticed that the Steve Jobs 
Way had changed after Jobs left.

Apple is still suffering from several Job/Sculley-isms, IMHO.

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