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From: aaron@jessica.stanford.edu (Aaron Wallace)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: New MS Windows (?)
Message-ID: <1990May31.072828.2220@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 90 07:28:28 GMT
References: <14934@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Sender: Aaron Wallace
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Science Department
Lines: 37

In article <14934@dime.cs.umass.edu> roskill@cs.umass.edu writes:
>So...what would be the cost of say a Mac IIcx in the PC world?

Mac IIcx is roughly comparable to, let's say, a 20 MHx 386 w/1.44 floppy,
40-60 Meg HD, mouse, VGA/color, DOS/Windows, and 4meg.  I'd say finding this
for under $2500 wouldn't be too hard...

>I would bet that the pricing would be fairly close.  Given this,
>the Mac still seems like the better option because all of the program
>currently out there are designed around the MacOS, as opposed to
>Windows 3.0 which will require a wait to get up to the Mac's number
>of applications.

This is a good point--no machine runs vaporware.  It'll be real interesting
to see what is ported to Windows.  Maybe Windows will provide enough of a mass-
market to help finance more Windows *and* Mac apps...

>Aaron...I think you got this wrong.  All the Mac applications I've worked
>with (with Macsbugs on) would just quit and leave the machine fairly 
>intact.  It doesn't work all the time...but, as with Windows 3.0, if the
>error wasn't too extreme, the MacOS will kick it out and continue.

This issue was more muddled that I thought!  It seems that the Mac (and PCs)
can trap certain errors (i.e. division by zero, illegal instruction) and will
terminate the offending application.  I have a buggy shareware program that
does this with Win 2.xx.  I guess I'm unclear whether or not System 6 or 7
will support memory protection. I understood they didn't, but have been lead to
believe otherwise.  By protection, I mean that if a program tries to address
a chunk of memory it doesn't own, it traps and gets kicked out.  This seems to
be a vital element to multitasking, since it protects applications from each
others' bugs.  If System 6/7 do have this, is a PMMU needed?

Aaron Wallace

P.S. It must be nice to talk about System 7 w/o circumlocution.  Before 
     Win 3.0 was released, everyone was bound by nondisclosure mumbo-
     jumbo into talking about "possible future upgrades" of Windows!