Xref: utzoo comp.misc:4512 comp.sys.ibm.pc:22576
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!imspw6!bob
From: bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Request for poll of ten best/worst products of 88
Message-ID: <210@imspw6.UUCP>
Date: 26 Dec 88 16:13:54 GMT
Organization: IMS Inc., Rockville, MD
Lines: 108


 
 
From Ted Holden, HTE:
 
 
 
Each year around Christmas time, a number of the magazines such as Byte
and PC Magazine publish a list of what they regard as the top ten products
of the ending year in our industry, or possibly what they regard as the
ten most "significant" products.
 
I have reached a point at which I no longer trust the motives of most
magazine editors and columnists, and have sharp disagreements with a
couple of the items which I have seen in the ten-best lists of at least a
couple of the magazines.  I would be interested to see what Usenet readers
might regard as the ten best or ten most significant, as well as ten worst,
not just in the PC/DOS world, but across the industry.
 
My own tallies for "best/most-significant" and worst don't quite come to
exactly ten in either case, and reflect a rather parochial outlook, since
I deal mostly with UNIX and DOS equipment, and have little contact with
Macs, Ataris, and several other worlds, but would run roughly as follows:
 
Best or most important, not in any particular order:
 
        The Zortech C++ compiler, baseline version 1.07
 
        Ventura Publisher
 
        The little $180-$250 hand scanners advertised now in virtually
        all PC magazines
 
        The X-11 graphics system from MIT
 
        Open-Look
 
        SemWare's "Quick Edit" or "Qedit" text editor
 
        The Hewlett Packard Paint-Jet printer
 
        The Publisher's Paintbrush package from Zsoft
 
        The NeXt computer
 
        The Yale Univ. "Linda" system for parallell processing.
 
        The Compuserve GIF format for graphics interchange
 
        The read/write/erase optical disk from MaxStor and, presumably,
        other vendors
 
 
The losers category:
 
 
        The proliferation of cheap FAX machines, X percent of which attach
        to computers.  Not that there arent legitimate uses for a FAX
        machine here and there, but sometimes I think American businessmen
        must all take stupid pills;  most if not all of the uses I actually
        see FAX machines being put to could be far more effectively and
        inexpensively handled by cheap modems sending WordPerfect formatted
        files over the phone lines using Procomm.  Media hype wins again...
 
        OS/2 or, as I refer to it, BS/2.  In a couple of years, virtually all
        normal computers will be running UNIX.  Micro managers will be seeing
        386-based desktop machines with applications for which DOS no longer
        will suffice, and virtually all mid-sized machines, database servers
        etc., which run UNIX.  The choice for an OS for the desktop machines
        will be simple:  UNIX, and ordinary UUCP connections between the
        desktops and the mid-sized machines, or OS/2 and forever endure the
        pain of dealing with the two dissimilar worlds. This lack of
        portability/connectivity will, more than anything else, kill OS/2.
 
        The MCA architecture.  Apparently, at this stage of the game, playing
        the game under strict IBM rules is simply unacceptable to the majority
        of the people who deal with microcomputers in America.  There is a
        guaranteed place in the history books still waiting for the first
        yuppie manager to actually fire somebody for buying IBM hardware,
        i.e. "Johnson, you're the idiot who bought those PS/2 model 80s over
        there.... YOU'RE FIRED!!!!!!!".
 
        Aldus Pagemaker, PC version:  Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on this
        one or if I've missed some reasonable method for using this product; I
        don't claim to be any kind of expert on this topic.  This product gets
        a lot of hype in the media which I figure is ill-founded;  the one
        or two times I've ever tried to use it on 10-12mh ATs, which you have
        to figure are the natural machines for it to run on, it has appeared
        too slow to use, you mostly sit and watch disk lights flash for many
        seconds while attempting font shifts and other simple operations.
 
        The Ada programming language.  Recent articles tell a grim story on
        this one, especially the series of articles in the Dec. 88 issue of
        Electronics Defense.  Suppose that, after 15 years of effort, the best
        anyone could say about C was "C: Maybe Not So Bad After All", or that
        "with C, you will only have major language-related software problems
        with ten percent of your requirements..", or that attempts to use C
        for embedded systems, the stated main purpose of Ada, had utterly
        failed due to the slowness of C and that project managers constrained
        to use C regardless had ended up using VRTX and a reduced subset of
        C functionality which effectively reduced the variant of C being
        used on the project to a subset of Pascal.  Would anybody want to be
        in the business of selling C compilers after all that hit the news
        stands?  I know I wouldn't.