Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Tony Cooper]

In article <7661 at segue.segue.com>, gene at segue.segue.com (Gene Hightower)
writes:

|> Since when has Apple ever produced "superior hardware" at the "same
|> price" as Sun, or anyone else for that matter.  Macintosh systems are

I was speaking in the future wishfully. I was setting out some aims for
Apple. One aim should be to produce competitive hardware. The success of
the cheap Macs has proved that price makes a difference.

|> Try not to mix up user interface with operating systems.  Apple likes
|> 
|> Operating systems are to provide things like process scheduling,
|> memory management, filesystems/disk management and networking.  MacOS
|> can't do those kinds of things like most current Unix systems can.
|> 

Good point. MacOS has a great user interface but only a "fair" operating
system.

|> I think that no clear winner has been chosen in the GUI war.

I think that the MacOS GUI is a clear leader for the time being. But let's
not debate that point.

What I would like to say in this posting is that I think Apple's claims
regarding the MacOS interface for UNIX are misleading. I once looked at
an Apple ad in Unixworld for A/UX and nearly every claim they made was not
true. I don't have the ad handy so I can't pull it to bits right now.

But basically, A/UX does not provide a graphical interface to Unix. All
that it does is to provide windows within which the usual command line
interface gets used. I can provide the same "graphical interface" by
taking a terminal to some Unix box and a can of paint and painting
a title bar and scroll bars etc on the terminal. Sure, A/UX does give
you multiple windows but they act no differently from having multiple
terminals. The only advantage is cut and paste between windows, which
cannot be done with terminals.

Where I am wrong is in the Finder interface to file manipulation. This
truely is a graphical interface. But all it does is let you move, rename,
delete, and copy files graphically. But these are nothing really to do
with Unix. These operations are common to any operating system, are simple,
and hardly help at all in hiding the unfriendly parts of Unix from the user.
The user still has to deal with things like file potections, pipes, the
man pages, the syntax of commands, blah blah blah - all the horrible
bits of Unix. In fact, some of these things have been further complicated
by the interface. For example, there are now two sets of file protections;
the Unix set, and the MacOS set. You can lock a file using the get info
box but Unix still thinks it is unlocked and can happily delete it, not
knowing that it is locked.

Where Apple have improved the interface to Unix is in the use of Commando
and in providing a MacOS style editor (TextEdit). It seems that Apple
spend most of their time providing MacOS compatibility under A/UX. For
all the work involved, it does not provide much to the user. It only
provides emulation of an operating system that the user has already.
When you think about it, that is the dumbest thing anybody could do.
People must have better things to do with their money than to buy a
package that emulates an operating system that they already have. Why
would anyone want to run a program under A/UX+MacOS rather than under
MacOS? I could understand it if A/UX made MacOS better in some way, but
it doesn't. the emulation will always be inferior to the real thing.

And that will never change. Unix software houses will write Unix software
because they will have a bigger market that way than if they write just
for A/UX. And MacOS software houses will write MacOS software using
MacOS features, not Unix features because more people will have pure MacOS
than A/UX. The only reason to have MacOS running under A/UX is to avoid
the convenience of rebooting to run MacOS programs. And this is only an
advantage when one has only one computer. If you have two machines or
more and want MacOS and Unix then the sensible thing to do is buy a
MacOS machine and a common Unix machine. Then you get the advantages of
being able to use lots of MacOS software and lots of Unix software. But
if you buy two Macs you get to run lots of MacOS software and a little
bit of Unix software (and probably pay more for the hardware than if you
bought a pure Unix machine).

In short, A/UX provides an "inferior" Unix and an inferior MacOS. I love it
because I like having both. (I put the word in quotes because I mean in
the limited sense of "inferior number of commercial software packages
available".

Cheers,
Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz