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From: bskendig@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: What System 7 Does For You: A summary.
Message-ID: <9348@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 9 May 91 20:16:44 GMT
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Starfleet Academy: Princeton University
Lines: 191

Due to all the questions recently that all are variations on "Why
should I upgrade to System 7.0?  What good is it, really?", I've
decided to update and repost an article I put here about two months ago.

-----
>... Should I get it?  Will it attempt to rape my Mac IIcx just like
>many of these other upgrades do? I wish someone would post the major
>changes/advantages of system 7.0.  How much of my life will be trashed
>in the uneasy transition to 7.0?

Yes, System 7 is designed to totally trash your Macintosh.  Well over
a year of careful design and development was spent fine-tuning the
system to cause loss of crucial data at the worst times possible, and
the system manuals were revised countless times to make them as
obscure and misleading and confusing as they could be.

But seriously, folks:

No, it will not `rape' your Macintosh.
No, the transition will not be uneasy.
No, your life will not be trashed.

The difference between System 6 and System 7 is something akin to the
difference between Microsoft Windows 3.0 and anything on a Macintosh.

System 7 includes lots of little built-in things that you won't know
how you ever lived without:

... an intelligent System Folder that knows exactly where to put
things you drop into it,
... an Apple Menu that you can configure just by putting things into a
folder (no more Font/DA Mover),
... the ability to open suitcases and cdevs (no more Control Panel)
and even the System File itself directly from the Finder,
... a Finder that actually does more for you and fixes seven years
worth of little glitches and anomalies that you've probably long since
taken as facts of life (and it even adds beautiful color, and keeps the
Trash can where you move it, and adds labels and list views and stuff),
... the addition of aliases (which you will probably quickly find gobs
of uses for: a file can now appear in several places.  Drop an alias
of Microsoft Word in the Apple Menu Items folder!  Double-click on an
alias of a fileserver, and have your Mac automatically connect to the
fileserver for you!),
... the ability to have TeachText quickly open any `README' file that
used to elicit the dialog "The application that created this document
is busy/missing,"
... the ability to hit command-option-escape and quit out of an
application that has hung or bombed,
... the ability to give an icon to any file merely by pasting any
graphic into a "Get Info" window (graphics are resized to fit),
... the ability to move through files in Finder windows by typing
their names and using the arrow keys and Tab key,
... the ability to "hide" applications (Multifinder is always turned
on under System 7, so if the screen becomes too cluttered with
windows, just hide a few applications -- their windows will vanish
until you show the applications again)...


And then, once you've gotten past the little niceties, you get to the
big stuff:

AppleEvents -- you can write a small text editor that can tell
somebody else's small spell checker to check your document, or you can
have HyperCard tell the Finder to open your favorite paint program
then tell that paint program to open a file and print it.

The Edition Manager -- you can analyze statistics with your
spreadsheet and `publish' that file, then write up a report with your
word processor and `subscribe' to the spreadsheet file when you place
it in your report.  Find that your numbers were off somewhere?  Load
up the spreadsheet file, change the numbers, and save your work -- and
the part of it you copied into your report is automatically updated to
reflect the change.

Personal FileShare -- you want the guy down the hall to be able to get
at some of your files?  Just turn FileShare on, and he can mount your
hard drive as a server on his Mac or IBM without interrupting your
work.  The files need to be seen by more people?  Set up user accounts
and groups and priviledges for your various files and folders by using
familiar techniques in the Finder.  Need to be able to get to your
hard drive from any machine on the network?  Turn FileShare on, drop
an alias of your hard drive onto a floppy disk, then you can pretend
that the floppy disk contains everything on your hard drive -- because
when you put it into a Mac and open the alias, the Mac will
automatically mount the hard drive on your machine and give you access
to its files.

The Help Manager -- you have an application that's so complex that it
looks like it was coded by Martians?  Just use the Help menu (right
next to the Applications menu at the right end of the menubar, which
is where the Multifinder icon used to be) to turn on interactive help,
and point to what you don't grok.  Balloons of text will appear as you
move your pointer, explaining exactly what such-and-such is and why
it's highlighted or turned off or what-not.

Virtual Memory -- on any Mac with a PMMU in it (all Mac II class
machines except the original Mac II), you can tell it to pretend that
part of the hard disk is really RAM memory.  If you have 2 megs of
memory in your machine, and you need five megs for a little while,
just add three megabytes of virtual memory: the Mac will use some hard
disk space to store the information that it's pretending is in memory,
and it will load this information back into RAM when it needs it.  (In
this example, you'll need 3M free on the hard drive to store the
virtual memory, and another meg or two for some free room in which to
swap stuff out of RAM onto the disk.)

Sound good?  Too good, maybe?  Bugs, right?

Nope.  This isn't going to be another case of System 6.0 (oops) 6.0.1
(whups) 6.0.2 (aah) ... 6.0.5 (nice) 6.0.6 (oops) 6.0.7 (crash).

This thing's been in development for well over a year now.  Apple made
a CD-ROM with the alpha 9 version of the code, and sent it to
developers so people could begin making _sure_ their programs worked
well with System 7.  Then they did the same with the beta 1 version
(which included a list a mile high of reported and resolved bugs), and
then again with the beta 4 version.  They even went through a handful
of `final candidate' versions, ironing out the most minor glitches.

If you're holding out for System 7.0.1, you'll be waiting a long time
while the rest of us are on cloud nine.

However, before 7.0 is officially released, there are a few things you
can do to get ready for it.

- Don't expect to keep using System 6 if you depend at all on your
Macintosh for work.  As applications begin taking advantage of all the
new features, your machine will be at a dead-and in terms of what it
can run; as you see people working even more quickly and easily with
the improved Finder, you'll be deciding to upgrade.

- Therefore, if you have a Macintosh with only one megabyte of memory,
upgrade it now to at least two.  System 7 includes a Multifinder
that's integrated into the system -- you can't turn it off.  Therefore
it *requires* 2Mb to even load into your machine in the first place,
and probably 2.5-3Mb to be of any great use if you're a Multifinder
enthusiast.  As soon as System 7 is released, hordes of people may
very well create a backlog of SIMMs, and then you'll be kicking
yourself for not planning ahead.

- System 7 works fine with Plusses, SE's, and Classics.  However, that
doesn't necessarily mean that it works _quickly_.  The engineers at
Apple have done a *tremendous* job of optimizing the code to do quite
well on the 68000-based machines, but if you use your SE or
(especially) Plus for several hours each day, it might not be a bad
idea to look into selling your machine while you still might be able
to get some money for it, and upgrading to a Macintosh LC or IIsi.  If
you're in the market for a Macintosh, don't be blindly lured by the
enticing price of the Classic; the small nine-inch screen of the
compact Macs definitely hampers System 7 more than it did System 6,
because you're likely to have more windows open on the screen at a
time (what with Multifinder on all the time).

- System 7 will offer `virtual memory' to anyone whose machine has a
PMMU.  This means that you can take a IIci with four megs of memory,
for example, and tell it to simulate having eight megs, as long as you
have enough free space on your hard drive to store the swapfiles.
Virtual memory is nice, but it's slow; if you can afford the RAM,
you'll be doing yourself a favor.  (Here's a VM tip: If you use more
virtual memory than you've got RAM in your machine, you might find
your machine slowing down due to frequent and heavy disk accesses.  As
a rule of thumb, if you have, say, 4M RAM in your machine, add no more
than 4M virtual for a total of 8M if you want to keep peppy.)

When System 7.0 is released, it'll most likely be available everywhere
on the release date.  Apple's most likely not going to stand in the
way of letting anyone have a copy of it; all you'll need to do is
bring seven 800k floppies or four 1.4Mb floppies to your local Apple
dealer, and copy away.  (Then bring 'em back to your office, install
it on your machine, set up folders containing the contents of the
disks, and use Personal FileShare to make your hard drive available to
the network; people can then upgrade from System 6 to System 7
directly from your machine, without ever having to worry about getting
copies of the distribution disks!)

If you want documentation, that will be an additional charge ($90, I
think, is the price that's been given here).  Copying disks is free
and simple; copying lots and lots of paper is a hassle which dealers
usually don't want to go through.

     << Brian >>

Disclaimer: I don't work for Apple.  All of this information comes
from public sources such as MacWeek, and my own experience in using
System 7.0b4.  (I removed 6.0.7 from my hard drive long ago; 7.0 is
much more stable and a heluvalot better, in my opinion.)

| Brian S. Kendig      \ Macintosh |   Engineering,   | bskendig             |
| Computer Engineering |\ Thought  |  USS Enterprise  | @phoenix.Princeton.EDU
| Princeton University |_\ Police  | -= NCC-1701-D =- | @PUCC.BITNET         |
"You gave your life to become the person you are right now.  Was it worth it?"