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From: dtt@unirot.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Running in place
Message-ID: <867@unirot.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Jul-86 14:48:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: unirot.867
Posted: Wed Jul 16 14:48:41 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Jul-86 22:44:19 EDT
Reply-To: dtt@unirot.UUCP (David Temkin)
Organization: Public Access Un*x, Piscataway NJ (The Soup Kitchen)
Lines: 36
Keywords: Reinventing the wheel

It's been three years and six months since Apple first showed the
Lisa.  Just to remind everyone, it was a machine much like the Mac,
except that it had a 12" screen, 1 meg of memory, slots, and an
operating system which allowed multiple applicatins to be visible on
the screen at once (in their own windows) while keeping the desktop
visible at all times.  Each application was, in effect, a
"multi-document" application, because multiple windows on the same
application were allowed.  Clicking in a different application's
window (or a desktop window) changed the menu bar appropriately.  The
filesystem was a hierarchical one.  Full cutting and pasting between
applications was supported (and there was no need to quit an
application to paste something into another application, because they
could both be on the screen at once).  It came with a hard disk drive
and two floppies, each holding about 800K.  Development was done in
Clascal, Apple's object-oriented version of Pascal.  The machine even
ran Unix as an option.

Now, after herculean investments of time, effort, and money on the
part of Apple, the developer community, and the user community, it
appears that we haven't moved forward much at all.  The up-and coming
Mac (likely to be a few months away), will probably have 1 Meg of
memory, a 12" screen, slots, Andy Hertzfeld's Servant (a new desktop
manager), HFS, and MacApp (Apple's new commercial object-oriented
Pascal) for development, and a Unix option.  It should also have 2
800K floppies and a hard disk drive.  This machine bears more than a
superficial resemblance to the original Lisa of January 1983.  Sure,
it costs less, and there are more applications available, but its
basic characteristics don't show the 3 1/2 years that have passed
since the Lisa's introduction.  One would expect that it would have
taken far less time to deliver an affordable system that employs
(almost exculsively) established Lisa techonology.

Any comments?

	- David Temkin    ...caip!unirot!dtt
		       or ...caip!topaz!unipress!dt