Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Jon W{tte]

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

   company.  Shipping a system that calls itself S5R2 at this point in
   time tells me that Unix and open systems take a back seat to the very
   closed MacOS that is the bread and butter of Apple.

Hmm.. There's this thing called MacMach that we've been hearing
about now & then...

   Since when has Apple ever produced "superior hardware" at the "same
   price" as Sun, or anyone else for that matter.  Macintosh systems are
   simple 68k boxes with no special or interesting features at all.

Except maybe competetive third-party disks & other peripherals,
plus EXTENDED video support. I know of NO other system that so
seamlessly integrates several screens of different depth on one
machine (yes, windows across a 24bit screen and a b/w work very well)

   Apple is always behind on clock speed and CPU type.  Right now, I
   think, Apple's high end system is a 68030 at 40MHz where other vendors
   (i.e. HP and NeXT) are shipping 50MHz '030 systems and 25MHz '040

They had that '30 with 40MHz 1.5 years ago, too. I firmly believe
a '40 machine is a matter of months. (or is that hope ?)

   Other vendors (Sun included) give you ethernet and much better video
   systems as standard features not requiring extra cards.

Well, there's always the price... And Sun video software stinks
when compared to Mac OS. Compare Mac third party video hardware
while you're at it...

   Apple is not in the business of offering "bang for the buck."

No, "ability for the buck," or maybe "experience for the buck"
is closer. What matters ?

   Try not to mix up user interface with operating systems.  Apple likes
   you to do this because all they have to offer over other 68k boxes is
   some user interface code written some years ago and a base of
   shrink-wrapped applications that use it.

Have you seen the latest release of OS software, aka system 7 ?
That's not written "some years ago."

   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.

No, it provides them unlike the UNIX way. With A/UX you have both.
The NBP and ZIP of AppleTalk are good services, for instance...
All of this is in the mac os, only differently from UNIX.

   Window systems and (more correctly) GUI toolkits and guidelines
   provide support for user interaction.

So where's the consistency ?

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

Well, I've used X11R4 with twm, tvtwm, Motif, ...
I've used Windows 3
I've even used some other esoteric GUIs now and then.
And I've used a Mac. I know what I like. If you don't, nobody's
forcing you to use it.

--
						Jon W{tte
						h+ at nada.kth.se
						- Speed !