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From: vita@daredevil.crd.ge.com (Mark F Vita)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Multitasking and interactivity issu (sense)
Message-ID: <5562@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 26 Feb 90 18:21:47 GMT
References: <105048@<1990Jan13> <126900151@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <18121@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <6840@internal.Apple.COM> <18243@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
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Reply-To: desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP (Mark F Vita)
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Organization: General Electric Corporate R&D Center
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In article <18243@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> jmpiazza@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Joseph M. Piazza) writes:
>In article <6840@internal.Apple.COM> lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein) writes:
>>It sort of depends on what your definition of success is, but consider 
>>that there are more applications multitasking under MultiFinder than under 
>>the Amiga O/S.  So MultiFinder is a success in that it provides 
>>multitasking without sacrificing the majority of the installed base of 
>>applications.
>
>	I agree strongly.  Aside from the multitasking, the Mac has proven
>to be an excellent design.  In particular, bringing it to it's current
>level of capabilities while maintaining compatibility is a major achievement.

Indeed.  At the Macworld Expo in Boston last August, Randy Battat from
Apple performed a neat little stunt that really drove this point home.
He had a Mac IIcx running System 6.0.3, and stuck in a 400K floppy
containing a vintage (circa 1984) copy of Microsoft Multiplan.  He did
a Get Info to show that the creation date was sometime in early 1984.
Then he double-clicked on it, and... IT RAN.  I was impressed.

Just think, back when Multiplan was written, all Macintoshes had:

  - an 8-MHz 68000
  - a 9-inch black-and-white display
  - 128K of RAM
  - 64K of ROM
  - no concept of a hard drive
  - no hierarchical file system
  - no MultiFinder

Granted, he may have had to dig around a bit to find an application
that would run, but nevertheless, it was pretty nifty to see that
Apple's latest (at the time) 68030-based hardware, running an OS that
had gone through several major revisions, could still run a 5-year old
application out of the box.

Perhaps most surprising of all was that the program was a Microsoft
application :-).  (Though I suppose Multiplan was written back in the
days when Microsoft was really doing Mac development, as opposed to
now, when all their code is bastardized so it will run under Windows,
OS/2, and other such bogosities...)

--
Mark Vita                              vita@crd.ge.com
General Electric CRD               	..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita
Schenectady, NY