From: justin@mik.uky.edu (Justin Sullivan)
Subject: Re: Mac OS just sucks -- "ease of use" = "lack of freedom" ?
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 12:19:18 GMT
X-Bytes: 

Mike Haas writes
> Oh, make no mistake about it... the Mac is VERY prone to jerkiness.
> 
> I sit at a 25 MHz 030 mac every day...many's the time I click on a window
> or double-click something and there is absolutely NO RESPONSE from
> the system for several seconds!  Often, I double-click again, maybe
> several times.

We've been through this once before, with one user saying that it DOESN'T do  
this. It does. I will say that it is very minimal, even with PrintMonitor on my  
really slow IIcx.. But the reason you get no response, I believe, is that your  
IIci has slow internal video, and probably (though there is no way to tell from  
here :) has no cache card. You should get one for about $100 and be amazed at  
the difference.
 
> Now, the mouse usually MOVES smoothly, 'cause it's movement generates
> interrupts which don't have to wait for GetNextEvent().  However, try
> moving the mouse on a Plus or SE while it's reading from the floppy...
> You'll witness the very definition of JERKINESS!  It's smooth on the
> accelerated machines 'cause they have the bandwidth to handle their
> interrupts quickly.

What did you expect? FLOPPY access on a SLOW drive with an ANCIENT computer..
 
> I am an Amiga fan, but I'm not blowing smoke here.  The system
> response of the Mac on ANY processor is horrible.  As soon as
> stuff starts going on in the background.

From the IIfx on up, the difference is not even noticeable.
Frequently, though, I only find that performance suffers when I activate a  
"background" application. Nothing else seems to be affected.
 
> It's cause the MacOS is so poorly designed for background processing that
> there are many situations it has to lock out every thing else...due
> to it's lack of re-entrancy.  Many, many restrictions on times when
> applications can allocate memory, do I/O.

Not really.. It is poorly-designed for preemptive multitasking, but it was  
never intended for it. Apple did a fantastic job with completely rewriting a  
system with virtually NO functional bugs (though there are a few cosmetic ones  
and the very rare 'disappearing files' bug :). But they couldn't just throw out  
what they had.. I see System 7 as a stepping stone to something better, but it  
is very useful.. Publish&Subscribe and Filesharing are going to work in our  
group maintaining consistency and making them easy to administrate.

> System 7 seems to further aggravate the problem with system response.
> Just turn on "calculate folder sizes" and watch how it runs.  To
> get absolutely nothing done, enable VM at the same time.

Ah hah.. Now, when you turn on Calculate Folder Sizes, it does it in the  
background, and you do not lose any performance (unless you have a slow, badly  
fragmented hard drive, which is very likely..).
 
--
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* "Imagine sky.. High above, in Caribbean Blue.." <sigh>                      *
* The University of Kentucky doesn't pay well enough to share my opinions.    *
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