Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: Common toolkit Message-ID: Date: 8 Jan 90 23:13:32 GMT References: <8912162135.AA03025@iris.rand.org> <4290@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <4392@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <4458@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <5V++88ggpc2@ficc.uu.net> <4697@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 52 Now we're getting somewhere... Subject is: A UI that's common to PCs, Macs, Amigas, and... UNIX. > >How about the fact that there are several million such machines out there? > Well, how much money is Dec, HP, Sun, etc. going to make by developing > a toolkit usable on a 1 Meg machine? I don't expect Dec, HP, or Sun to do so. It's in their best interests to make the toolkit as large as is needed. Even if they can't make *much* money selling memory, it certainly doesn't hurt the balance sheet. > Besides, they don't want a toolkit that is comparable to the Mac/MS > Windows. They want one that is better. Well, from my experience with $10,000 machines running X, from a performance basis alone they've got a lot of catching up to do. Adding a larger and more complex toolkit sure isn't going to help. > Why buy a 5 grand machine when > you can run the same software on a $2,000 PC? Multitasking, protected memory, and so on. After all, the current situation they have is that their 5 grand machine can't run as much software as the $2000 PC. They still manage to sell a few. Actually, my $1000 PC has better performance and more software (on a title-count basis) than your typical $10,000 UNIX box. I'd expect that the motivation would be the other way around: to develop a toolkit so that the $5000 workstations are capable of running software written for $2000 PCs. There's more software like that than the other way around. > One of the advantages of Open Look and Motif is that it can do things > that the Mac/PC cannot do. That's debatable. UNIX can, yes, bt that'll be true no matter what the toolkit, or the UI. But from a UI viewpoint, what does a $5000 DECstation buy you that you can't do with a $2000 Mac? 2 extra buttons? I hate the one button mouse, but I wouldn't pay $1000 a pop to add more. People buy computers to run software, not to pin menus in place. Don't make it hard to write and port software. > If a Unix workstation doesn't have a better > toolkit, then it will be tough to get Mac/PC users to switch. If the toolkit keeps people from porting PC software, it's not going to help. The big boys will go over. You'll get Lotus. But what about the small-scale vertical market software? -- _--_|\ Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ Also or \_.--._/ v "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'