From: aeg03@rrz.uni-koeln.de (Jan T. Kim)
Subject: TOS vx. Mac OS (was: Falcon Graphics)
Reply-To: kim@vax.mpiz-koeln.mpg.dbp.de
Organization: Regional Computing Center, University of Cologne, F. R. Germany
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 92 11:32:59 GMT

In <Bu24Fr.FFx@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> gbcusg@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (I. Barnett) writes:

>In article <1992Sep04.123211.134011@rrz.uni-koeln.de> kim@vax.mpiz-koeln.mpg.dbp.de writes:

>>It's in the eye of the beholder whether TOS  or  the  Mac  OS  is
>>better.  I  just  don't  understand why so many beholders in this
>>group deem the Mac OS better...

>Try using the Mac for a while.  If atari had enforced O/S rules like apple
>does, like the standard 'FILE' and 'EDIT' menus, you would be able to use
>any application without any new knowledge like you can on the macv (to a
>certain extent).

Standard user interfaces have their  advantage,  but  freedom  in
styling  interfaces has its advantage too. Programs like CrackArt
and NoiseTracker don't seem to be possible on the Mac.
As far as I know the Mac, I  never  saw  anything  comparable  to
*.TTP  programs, i.e. programs that just do plain text outputThis
may not be user-friendly, but it certainly is programmer-friendly
as  the programmer does not have to wade through all that mess of
graphical text formatting, opening windows, constantly monitoring
for  user  actions like sizing, scrolling etc. Plain ASCII I/O is
not fancy  at  all,  I  know,  but  it's  highly  functional  and
sufficient  in  many  cases.  And  for  those that don't like it,
shells can be provided that do some  fancy  reformatting  of  the
data and display them in windows and so on. I/O redirection makes
it possible.

>What it boils down to is that the mac & ST came out at the
>same time but look at how far the Mac O/S has come compared to TOS.  Not
>only has apple constantly upgradaed and improved all facets of their os, 
>but they have encompassed it all in a single package (especially in system
>7).

The Mac OS is undoubtedly much more fancy than TOS.  But  beneath
the  fancy  surface  it  seems to be much more messy. A friend of
mine who works with a lot of big Mac machines told me that almost
all  of them seem to have weird crap on their disks, which is due
to system crashs  while  the  disk  contents  were  not  properly
updated.  And  there is a lot of funny reshuffling of "resources"
taking place, which can obviously create  many  problems,  either
for  the programmer who has to take care about all those possible
events or for the user, when something  goes  wrong  because  the
programmer forgot something.

>Let's compare adding new fonts: on the mac,  you drag the font file(s)
>to system folder and you're done.  On the ST, you have to get into arcane
>GDOS files like assign.sys and extend.sys.

I don't see why everyone is so excited about loading fonts on the
fly.  For  real  professional  purposes  you  have  to use system
specific fonts anyway -- Signum, Calamus, TeX, ... they all  work
with their own fonts for good reasons.  And  for  purposes  other
than  word  processing  or  DTP,  fonts are needed only for fancy
customization.

Greetinx, Jan

 +- Jan Kim -- X.400:    S=kim;OU=vax;O=mpiz-koeln;P=mpg;A=dbp;C=de -+
 |             Internet: kim@vax.mpiz-koeln.mpg.dbp.de               |
 |                                                                   |
 *----=<  hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans  >=-----*