Fun with Dick and Jane

[Mike Shaff]

ciao,

Please excuse the tone of the this letter, but I am slightly displeased with
Apple's handling of A/UX.  I do admit that I am using STILL using A/UX 1.0, but
the handling of the initial release and the update policy seem so bogus that I
am unsure as to whether I want continue along this path.  I purchased my first
Macintosh upon release and have been an Apple developer for the Macintosh since
1984.  I listened with glee to a briefing on the yet to be announced Mac II,
and the looked forward to the arrival of A/UX.  Sigh, where have the boys of
summer gone?

I remember when Apple was claiming that its mission was to change the world.
And how was that to be accomplished?  The Design and Implementation of a
computer system for "the rest of us."  Well, now, here I am, one of the rest of
us (I guess) trying to use an Apple product and feeling like I have entered the
mutant zone.  Why?  Apple lied.  They issue IM I-V and send out tech reports
about the importance of working with A/UX (yeah, yeah, 32 bit clean I know) and
produce software the adheres neither the letter nor the spirit of said
documents.

My story is simple, I often program in Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) and MIT
CScheme is a wonderful implementation of said language.  So I talked to one of
the authors about the difficulty of porting to A/UX; he thought that it would
not be too bad "after all it is SVID."  He was right with respect to the code
once I was told about set42sig everything was trivial, but the code was not to
be the problem.  CScheme, like most full blown implementations of Lisp is
large, so how does one get files to A/UX?  By floppy, of course, why would I
want to use the Apple tape drive that I purchased just for A/UX?  No pain, no
gain!  From the Mac OS side Tape Backup 40SC does not allow the backup nor
restoration of files with respect to A/UX, and from the A/UX side Tape Backup
40SC core dumps.  We all know that A/UX was released with support of the 400k
Disc (thank you Apple I knew you would never drop mfs support), I personally
wondered why HFS was introduced with all of the storage capacity of a 400k disc
available!  sash!  It has support for 'cp', it can 'see' Mac OS, and A/UX!

echo $PATH (mac):bin:|/sa/bin/

ls (mac):bin: can't find (mac):bin:

ls '(mac)':bin: ls '(mac):bin:' ls '(internal_hd):bin:'			;Where
"internal_hd" is a drive name etc

I know look at the manual where it describes the pathname conventions for use
within sash.  Hmmm, I know that it is here...  (2,0,0):bin: ??? Do you remember
the original Adventure???

To some up my illustration of JUST ONE NIGHT OF PLEASURE (there have been
others, but I want to save those stories for nights my children won't go to
bed), I pushed across, via floppy, release 6.2.2 of MIT CScheme (approx 2 Mb),
the latest release (beta 7.0) is approx. 6 Mb. and I have not decided whether I
will make the effort.  I could push the files across due to the presence of
compress (creates .Z files) and split, Mac OS programs that are greater than
400k seem to be impossible.  I have tried Stuff It, etc no luck.

I used to believe that Apple was different, better.  Now, I wonder whether "the
rest of us" referred to the suckers that are born every minute.

(peace chance)

	mas
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