Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!att!linac!unixhub!slacvm!streater From: STREATER@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (415) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: The Fate of the Macintosh Message-ID: <91082.084305STREATER@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 23 Mar 91 16:43:05 GMT References: <1991Mar22.154811.8691@rucs2.sunlab.cs.runet.edu> <1991Mar23.055725.27761@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1991Mar23.064856.4877@cs.ucla.edu> Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Lines: 69 I find it interesting the way in which this thread has developed. People are getting stuck over the Mac being/not being better than the Next (I refuse to pander to this NeXT rendition, it ain't grammar). What you have to look at is why we all thought the Mac is better than the PC. There are plenty of DOS-heads who positively revel in the complexity of the beast. I was at dinner with 20 or 30 random folks a few weeks ago, and to my left happened to be four guys who spent the whole evening comparing their PC-clones and talking about 33Mhz, access times, 486 upgrades, etc etc. *Not once* did the discussion rise to the level of what applications they had, why they actually had the machine in the first place. These folks operate at the lowest level of abstraction, and who am I to complain, since they were clearly having *fun*. The next level of abstraction has to do with trying to run applications under DOS, having to worry about EGA, VGA, CGA, 640k, autobat.exec (or whatever the hell its called), consys.fig, hymen.sys (oops sorry) and all the other random arcana that goes with it. There are plenty of people who do this and who get work done, albeit with frustration. The point about the Mac is that it took us to the next level of abstraction above that. All the trivial operations, such as copying files, renaming files, formatting disks, and the common application operations, such as open/close/quit, cut/paste, windows, etc, become identical. Not having to type the name of a files more than once, *ever*!! Having spaces in file names!! Well, you get the point. The net result is that people like my neighbour can do it. She bought a 2-floppy SE with a daisy wheel printer to prepare business letters, and told me she had to install the printer driver (drag the driver off the floppy and drop in the system folder), and this was "already more than I wanted to know about computers". Note the word "wanted". She is quite capable - just uninterested in the arcana. So she uses it as a tool, which is what it should be. The astute observer will have noticed my omission of Windows 3.0. It is my belief that this is the direction, if any, from which the danger for Apple will come. At present, Windows is hampered to some extent by the DOS past. However at some point all this history really will become history, and then there will be no reason to prefer a Mac over a 486 clone - the levels of abstraction will finally be the same. I don't know enough about, and haven't seen enough of Windows to be dogmatic about this, but I have a friend who recently spend three grand on a 33Mhz 386 system (commercial prices) which is rather more powerful, probably, than the IIsi I just bought at an educational price of three grand (with 13" Sony). He shares my jaundiced view of autobat.exec and all that stuff and we have had many discussions of where things might go. Clearly Windows will be a powerful competitor to the Mac as it gets better. We are both waiting to see what the next level of abstraction will be. In programming languages there are object-oriented offerings, in editors there are screen based systems following the Mac cut/paste paradigm (forget EMACS, JOVE etc, I have had UNIX systems at work for a year and have not had to worry about that stuff, there have always been screen based editors available). In desk top publishing there is Frame, Pagemaker, etc. Thus we can now get major *application* tasks done easily now. The Mac gave us a big leap over the line-by-line interface. Windows is now catching up fast in that area. Apple has to make as big a leap now as they did then - otherwise they will be history. Next has not really made a *big* leap, near as I can tell, just polished things up rather nicely. The other thing to beware of is becoming emotionally attached to a certain machine. Its a hard lesson to learn, but one risks being backed into a corner as it becomes harder and harder to defend a certain position. So take heed, all you partisans! (And this from a Mac partisan!). It will not surprise me at all if in say 3 years I am junking my IIsi, and buying a 586 clone with 32 mbytes, a gig of disk, all for $2k. And if Apple is s amaller company that today. If this happens, we will still owe Apple a lot. After all, they introduced the next level of abstraction. And forced those MS-DOS klods, finally, to follow suit.