Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!spdcc!ima!haddock!suitti
From: suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Steve Uitti)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Black Apple (problems installing systems)
Message-ID: <9867@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 21 Oct 88 20:54:21 GMT
References: <1052@microsoft.UUCP> <9601@haddock.ima.isc.com> <65200@felix.UUCP>
Reply-To: suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Stephen Uitti)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 76

In article <65200@felix.UUCP> kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr) writes:
>In article <9601@haddock.ima.isc.com> suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Stephen Uitti) writes:
>>	About a month ago, I upgraded to system 6.0 on my Mac II.  A
>>friend upgraded his SE to 6.0 at about the same time.  We both used to
>>the installer to do the upgrade.
>>	My friend found 6.0 so buggy that he reverted...
>>	The moral of the story is that the installer is broken.
>Thanks for the information. That explains why I couldn't revert...
>But instead of erasing the entire hard disk, I just trashed the
>hybrid system I got by attempting to use System 5.0's installer
>on top of System 6.0.
	I tried various things along those line.  The 5.4 (i thing)
installer wouldn't make a correct system.  The OS wouldn't let
me get rid of the old system.  None of the other tricks worked.

>I guess you programmers have a whole arsenal of tricks to find
>bugs us ordinary users can't see (I'm not complaining!).
	I was acting as a naive user.  Selective incompetence is one
such powerful tool.  "you programmers" may not apply to me.

>I'm still using the original System 6.0 on a Mac II at work
>without problem one that I can attribute to the system.
	My first few weeks showed 6.0 to be fine.  It was only when I
had time to really play with it that it showed its true colors
(sometimes black and white on my color monitor).

>(Now trying to run Word and Canvas together and moving lots of windows around
>too fast is another story. My mini demos of multifinder's capabilities always
>crash in front of prospective owners, but I attribute that to Word's inability
>to deal outside the first megabyte of memory.)
	Word is such a pain.  On the one hand there is some huge
gaping hole with EVERY feature it has.  On the other hand, there
exists a work around for each of these bugs.  On the third hand (I'm
running out of hands), I don't know of another word processor that
covers the same ground (for what I paid for for Word).  Inattention to
detail (the character kerning was fixed in 3.02, but still isn't quite
right), poor error checking, poor error recovery, odd (undocumented)
requirements for the use of some features (in 3.02, when you do double
column text, put the ending section marker in AFTER setting up the
section, not before, then use negative offsets to get it to look the
way you really want it), etc., just make life miserable.

>>	MacroMaker is brain dead.
>MacroMaker did not run one of my "creations" (can't remember what it was),
>but I was super-impressed when I could combine QuickKeys definitions (menu
>choices and aliases) into a longer string using MacroMaker. I used MacroMaker
>to set up the nice quotes (which is the purpose of QuickKeys alias function,
>but I just hadn't done it yet).
	I don't use QuickKeys.  I did look at it once to see if I'd
like it.  It is possible that I would have done the work to make
MacroMaker work (find the work arounds), if I was the type of person
who uses (and likes) that sort of thing.  My early experiments failed
miserably, and were so discouraging.  No "put it through its paces"
here, I just tried to use it.

>Maybe I just don't expect software to do as much as you do.
	I want software to behave this way: either do stuff correctly,
and THE SAME each time, or tell you it won't.  Predictability is
paramount.

>It's all magic to me and I'm delighted with what I can do today in
>comparison to the NBI word processor I used to work with (8-inch
>single-sided floppies - not even proportional spacing, let alone
>different font sizes and types, slow daisy wheel printer, etc. - only
>about a year ago).
	It's magic to me, even (especially?) when I've written it.
However, when things were simpler, things tended to be more
predictable.  I'm not saying that this was better (it isn't).  I'm
saying, "before we move on, we have to fix what we have".  That's why
I erased my hard disk and started from scratch.  I figured it couldn't
be this bad, they would never have released it.  By starting from the
begining, I was emulating the Beta testers.  It worked for them.

>Shirley Kehr

	Stephen Uitti