Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!oliveb!apple!oracle!csimmons
From: csimmons@oracle.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: MACWORLD presents  A real Macintosh Clone?
Message-ID: <800@oracle.oracle.com>
Date: 18 Mar 89 06:08:58 GMT
References: <9979@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <2272@buengc.BU.EDU> <2258@ndsuvax.UUCP> <2646@garth.UUCP>
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Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
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In article <2646@garth.UUCP> curry@garth.UUCP (Ray Curry) writes:
>As my own editorial comment, I found the article not at all funny.
>It was far too long without any humorous exaggerations and the April 1
>delivery date was all that indicated it wasn't a true story.  Now Philip
>Kahn's speach about his new operating system, the "BS2"..., now that was
>funny.

I kind of thought the article was hilarious.  Even better than the
magazine article, however, was the newspaper article describing
people that had actually believed the magazine article.

There are a number of clear indications that the magazine article
was a joke.  First, the author clearly tells us that he is exposing
proprietary secrets.  Obviously, if the article was real, the author
would get sued real quick.

Second, the author is describing a dream product at a dream price.
(On rereading the article I notice that the author uses those words.)
Basically, here's a machine that costs $800 and which outperforms
systems costing $5000.  No one in their right mind is going to drop
the price that low on such a beautiful system.  Why take only $400
worth of profit when you could have $4000?

Third, there is absolutely no way that IBM is going to come out
with an exciting innovative product like the one described in the
article.

But I guess that Stephen Levy should have realized that the article
was going to be read by a bunch of software and hardware engineers,
and it is well known that they have no sense of humor...

-- Chuck