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From: toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Woz giveth, Scully taketh away
Message-ID: <1990Oct4.200213.14531@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 4 Oct 90 20:02:13 GMT
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philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes:

>Would also please note that Windows3.0 , OS/2, NeXTStep, OpenLook,etc...do not
>give you ONLY a GUI. They provide for a CLI. In my opinion, this is a serious
>weakness in the Mac OS( and GS/OS).

Um, have you double clicked Basic.Sytem lately?

CLI's are a lot easier to provide on the GS than they are on the Mac. There
are some fine Shareware CLI's available for the GS -- I prefer ORCA though.

>Pagemaker,Illustrator,etc...One can't really take these things seriously. It
>always amazes me the money people pay out to "consultants" who come in and
>hook up an Appletalk net for them using phonenet.

You wouldn't believe how many people are ignorant about networks and Don't Want
To Know How It Works Just Make It Work. Here at school we have had loads of fun
keeping our localtalks working -- the campus computing organization effectively
hired some of us after the fact...

>It may be of interest to you, since we are in the process of describing our
>friends' computer preferences, that most of the really good programmers
>where I work, who were enthusiastic when the Mac first came out, have ALL
>abandoned the Mac. They have moved on to platforms which are more powerful
>and easier to program.

I know what you mean, after talking to one of my friends who does program the
Mac -- one thing we are working on is an Appletalk chat & file transfer
facility that will be written for the Mac and the GS simultaneously. While
roughing out some of the features we examined the GS Window Manager call
TaskMaster, which handles nearly every standard desktop event you could ask
for -- and which is still not available on the Mac (jeez!)... Also after
reading about the structure of GS/OS I am very impressed and I sort of feel
sorry for the Mac that they will have to kludge foreign file system support
while the GS has it fully integrated into its O/S. Also the GS's support for
character I/O and redirection is much better defined (i.e. it's there!) than
the Mac, it has always been there in some form ever since the days of PR#1.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu