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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Color for the SE? (Is this a dumb question?)
Message-ID: <20875@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sun, 20-Sep-87 15:00:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20875
Posted: Sun Sep 20 15:00:46 1987
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Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
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In article <2851@husc6.UUCP> fry@huma1.UUCP (David Fry) writes:
>I don't think the Mac II is so expensive that this contorted
>effort would be cheaper.  You'd have to get a color monitor,
>more RAM and associated electronics and the license for the
>Quickdraw.  Plus, Color Quickdraw would be painfully slow for
>all but the simplest operations unless a 68020 was included.
>Why not just get a Mac II then?

Ahh, you miss my point. I never assumed that color quickdraw
necessarily requires a 68020: The current version of color quickdraw
uses 68020 instructions, true, but there is no 68020 instruction that
can not be expressed as a sequence of 68000 instructions. And as for
cheaper, consider:

Imagine you are a hardware vendor of an intelligent graphics
coprocessor box. You would like to enter the Macintosh market, but
only if it can make you a profit. Your cost to enter the market is the
cost to develop the drivers. Your profit depends on your sales. Now,
with color quickdraw available on the SE (and as an INIT file on the
MacPlus. (like the old "HD20" file that let 64k ROM macs do HFS.))
With color quickdraw available on many different macs, your potential
market is much bigger than just MacII owners. This can make the
difference between deciding to sell the device, and deciding not to.

So, even Mac II owners have a reason to push apple to make Color
QuickDraw available in RAM on the SE and the Plus: it will make it
easier for 3rd party vendors to justify producing color
systems compatible with their Mac. 

Such an intelligent color subsystem would not be slow: it would
recieve messages over, (for compatibility) the SCSI port, and do them
using its own processor, so that the Mac's CPU would be free to
compute the next graphics call in parallel.  But it only makes sense
to sell such hardware, if software authors will check for its presence
and use it if it exists.  Too many of today's color programs don't
realize that Pluses and SEs could be retro-fitted with color, and
instead of checking for color, they just check whether they are
running on a II. Software authors, clean up your act!

--- David Phillip Oster            --My Good News: "I'm a perfectionist."
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --My Bad News: "I don't charge by the hour."
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