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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Mac as appliance
Message-ID: <1168@uw-beaver>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 20:58:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1168
Posted: Mon Jul  9 20:58:37 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jul-84 07:15:54 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 66

From: Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice.arpa
Accepting the view that the Macintosh should be considered an appliance,
it still has a number of flaws.  Most of them can be corrected if Apple
is willing to take the effort to make the changes.

1) MacWrite cannot handle documents longer than roughly ten pages.  There
are two possible solutions:  (a) increase the amount of memory in the Mac,
or (b) modify MacWrite to be able to keep part of a document on disk.

2) MacWrite has no keyboard commands for moving the cursor, deleting lines
and blocks, etc.  After using Unix Emacs (no mouse) and Oil (a subset of
Emacs that has both keyboard and mouse commands), I can say that mice are
a big win ONLY IF YOU GET TO KEEP YOUR KEYBOARD COMMANDS.

3) MacWrite has no provision for handling footnotes at the bottom of a page.
Inserting footnotes by hand is a real pain on a typewriter; it is worse with
a word processor.  For a machine being sold in large numbers to students, the
lack of footnotes is a major omission.

4) MacWrite does not handle italics correctly -- they protrude beyond the
right edge of justified lines, and spaces between italics and regular text
look smaller than spaces between two words of regular text.

5) It is impossible to select any part of a MacPaint document that is larger
than the drawing window.

6) The System Disk should contain utilities such as
    - A font editor (you don't need to be a programmer to be able to
                     design a font -- artists are probably better at
                     font design than most programmers)
    - A two-disk copy program that doesn't require inserting the
                     Startup disk in the middle of the backup.
    - A keyboard configuration editor (so you can change the keyboard
                     layout to DVORAK, rebind the editor keys (see
                     above), etc.)
    - A Font Mover program that can move fonts between two System disks
                     directly (no need for an intermediate Fonts file)

7) The Calculator on the Apple menu is next to useless.  Surely a $2500
computer can simulate a calculator with memory, sqrt, sin, cos, etc.

8) The ImageWriter has an aspect ratio problem (it only prints 72dpi in the
vertical direction, while the Mac screen is 80dpi) that results in MacPaint
skipping every tenth line on printouts.  This makes patterns look rather bad.

9) Although the cloverleaf key acts like the CTRL key on other computers, it
occupies a rather awkward position by the space bar.  It really should be in
the position currently occupied by the CAPS LOCK key.  Interchanging the two
keys (& offering a cheap upgrade to present owners) would make the keyboard
100% better than it is now.

10) There is almost no software out for the Macintosh!!  The packages I have
seen so far are:
        Habadex & MailMerge    (both cost $$$$, have poor reviews)
        Transylvania           (but it has bugs that can trash the disk)
   *    Microsoft BASIC        (generic MBASIC made inconvenient to use)
        Microsoft Multiplan    (had bugs; currently pulled from the market)
   *    Creative Solutions     (has bugs in documentation & program, but
                Forth                  some work is being done with it)
        MacWrite/MacPaint      (MacWrite needs quite a bit of work, but
                                       MacPaint is almost polished)

   * - of interest mainly to programmers

Unless a fair amount of GOOD software becomes available for this machine
quickly, it may go the way of the TI 99/4A.  That would be a shame.