Aucbvax.6481
fa.works
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works
Mon Mar 15 02:16:33 1982
Hardware Driven?
>From Jeffrey@Office-2 Wed Mar 10 09:54:31 1982

I've  been reading WorkS mail for a couple of  months.   I  have  the
impression that  the  discussions like current commercial workstation
technology tend to be hardware driven. 

Recently the Apple people  (yes,  that's  Apple  like in Apple II and
Apple ///) have been consistently saying that  they  think  the  real
problems are software problems.  Unix may be  a  wonderful system for
developing and maintaining files of  source  code,  but  how  do  you
support any graphic application under Unix?

I hear rumors that the next Apple machine may support a sophisticated
application  development  environment   including   a  language  like
Smalltalk.  If  this  is  true, then Apple may steal the show for the
next generation of small systems. 

My  impression  of  things  is that with  sophisticated  "information
graphics" software development capabilities,  small  computers can be
really be made orders of magnitude more  useful  than the ones we are
seeing today (and that includes the vanilla 68000/Unix systems). 

I'd love to hear comments, responses - anything.  Can anyone describe
the high level application  development  facilities available through
existing systems.   I'm  very  interested  in facilities which can be
used to by software to  manipulate  sophisticated displays displays. 
The kinds of things that SUN and STAR are aiming towards. 

Does anyone know what Apple has been doing for several years with all
those computer scientists (I doubt  that  they  are  writing Apple II
applications in AppleSoft).

Thanks,




                                   Jeffrey Stone
                                   Menlo Park, Ca.

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