Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough?
Message-ID: <354@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 29 Oct 88 05:54:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: auspex.354
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 59

>He sees the NeXT as trying to impose a visual, object-oriented overlay
>("a Smalltalk-like environment") onto a text-oriented UNIX base.
>These he contended are incompatible notions--they mix like "oil and
>water."  The UNIX base insures that the visual and sound-oriented
>capabilities can't be used in any truly revolutionary way.

This sounds like one of those annoying oracular pronouncements - often
made, to use Dorothy Parker's line, "without fear and without research" -
that computer types are occasionally prone to.

1) What does he mean by "a text-oriented UNIX base"?  What is the "UNIX
   base"?

   Does he mean the OS, considered in the sense of "sections 2, 3, 4,
   and 5 of the programmer's manual" (or "sections 2, 3 and 4 of the
   programmer's manual and section 7 of the administrator's manual" for
   those of you in S5-land)?  If so, I don't see what's "text-oriented"
   about it; the OS intrinsics (whether implemented as traps to the
   kernel or not) aren't all that "text-oriented" - file I/O is in
   sequences of bytes, which need not be text.

   Does he mean what small set of routines you might think of as "user
   interface" routines are in the OS intrinsics set?  Well, the NeXT
   machine comes with a window system toolkit, just like the Mac, so
   you're not stuck with "printf".

   Does he mean the utilities?  Well, they're useful for some things,
   and it's nice that you can probably get at them from NeXTStEP;
   however, they're not the be-all-and-end-all of UNIX.  You can
   implement a set of "visual, object-oriented" utilities atop them, if
   you wish.

2) How does he consider these notions "incompatible"?  I had the
   impression that the Mac's moral equivalent of the UNIX OS intrinsics
   - file system, mainly, and assorted goodies like time-of-day
   services, etc. - were not all that radically more "revolutionary"
   than the UNIX ones.  If you ignore the two-part file poop, doesn't
   the Mac basically have files that are collections of bytes?  There's
   little, if anything about the Mac file system that I'd consider
   "revolutionary"; hell, the first version didn't support a
   hierarchical directory structure, and this was *after* several other
   OSes, including UNIX, showed that such directory structures work
   nicely - Multics did so *quite* a while ago.

   The Mac has other intrinsics that vanilla UNIX doesn't currently
   have.  Two that come to mind are the window system and graphics
   toolkits - but UNIX is now, following its grand tradition of "first
   it has no WXYZ, then it it has more WXYZs than you care to think of",
   acquiring several of them (if NeXT licenses NeXTStEP to more than
   IBM, it may acquire one more) - and the internationalization stuff, a
   lot of which is covered by ANSI C.  The same applies for the sound
   intrinsics; presumably the NeXT box has a similar set of intrinsics.
   (Or will.)

The main potential difference I see is that the Mac has zillions more
applications than the NeXT box *currently* has.  However, I don't see
that UNIX makes it impossible to write the same kind of applications,
and UNIX+NeXTStEP may end up making it easier to write them than the Mac
OS/Toolbox does.