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From: jimb@amdcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Running in place
Message-ID: <12394@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Jul-86 01:23:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.12394
Posted: Sat Jul 19 01:23:06 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Jul-86 22:30:25 EDT
References: <867@unirot.UUCP>
Reply-To: jimb@amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler)
Organization: AMD, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 46
Keywords: Reinventing the wheel

In article <867@unirot.UUCP> dtt@unirot.UUCP (David Temkin) writes:
>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
>...
>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?

Yes. I agree with your observation, the Mac soon to be introduced will provide
us with the functionality of the LIsa at approx. one-third the cost.

No. I don't think three and a half years is an excessive amount of time. I
think you are taking to narrow a view. It is more like seven years to get
the Xerox star environment to an affordable price range. Apple will
have done it. No one else has. And yes, six months after Apple does it,
Atari may do it for half Apple's price. Ain't reverse engineering wonderful?

I think you should look around, see if anyone else has done it, and conclude
from the fact nobody else has that it might be harder than you thought.
Unless, of course, you think nobody else thinks it is worth doing?

-- 
 Jim Budler
 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 (408) 749-5806
 Usenet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amdcad!jimb
 Compuserve:	72415,1200

Once and for all: I like my Macintosh