From: calvinc@ohm.berkeley.edu (Calvin Cheng)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re:  Mac OS just sucks -- "ease of use" = "lack of freedom" ?
Date: 13 Apr 92 00:08:58 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.sajeqINNs3q
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: ohm.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Apr3.151200.18410@ms.uky.edu>, justin@graphlab.cc.uky.edu (Justin Sullivan) writes:
|> > 
|> > Apple has SVR2.  An old and moldy version.  I check out comp.unix.aux
|> > every so often, and all I see is complaining.
|> 
|> Apple has SVR4. You're living in the stone age. How can an SVR2 system be fully  
|> POSIX-complaint when that was before the days of true POSIX standards?
|> 
|> --

It's true that Apple only has SVR2 and they are not going to move from that.
But I have compiled a 100,000 line program with X11, IPC etc on A/UX that
was originally written for the SunOS.  It's a very badly organized program
that requires special system setups (wasn't done by a "software engineer" type).
And it works.  I encountered difficulties compiling the same program on
AIX and Ultrix for that matter.

What does that show?  SVR2 is not the most up-to-date.  But POSIX-compliancy
seems to be more important.  There doesn't seem to be many R4-specific
programs out there.

BTW, Apple hopes to release a microkernel upgrade that provides for multithreading
and inter-task communications by the end of the year.  It will still not
feature memory protection but that's not a long way off either.  There
are other exciting releases pending including AppleScript which allows for
a scripting environment where different processes can access one another's
features by sending AppleEvents, and the OCE or Object Collaboration Environment
which integrates e-mail operations in the same way that QuickDraw integrates
drawing and QuickTime integrates real time operations.  Apple is also
standardizing on object-oriented draw functions (say rotate or blend etc),
color matching and layout control (the still vaporware but soon-to-be-released
Layout Manager).  In addition, there's the Casper speech-recognition
technology which would conceivably be in the pen-based PDAs (Personal Digital
Assistants, and even rumored to be built-into the forthcoming Apple monitors).

The fact is that, there is hardly any system software that tries to do
as many things as the Apple system software.  Many of these may even
find there way into other OSes like Windows (yes, Apple is trying to beat
Microsoft at its own game) and even Solaris etc.  The focus is on cross-
platform compatiblity now that Apple is clearly migrating towards RISC
architectures.  That is what I view to be the biggest advantage of the
Mac OS over the AmigaDOS - it is far more generic in nature and will continue
to move along those lines (once that get rid of all the silly things that
have been put into the 1984 Mac).  You are not tied to any single hardware setup
(one or more monitors of arbitrary size and pixel depth, arbitrary kind of
CPU - perhaps the 680x0, 880x0, or POWER etc).

QuickTime is a perfect illustration.  To some, it means jerky video running
in tiny windows.  But that's not what it's really addressing.  It is
an expandable and flexible software protocol that can be expected to
support the latest technology as these become available.  The really nice
thing is that you can take vendor A's digitizer to grab frames,
compress it on vendor B's compressor board, and then display it with
vendor C's video board.  And none of these need to know one another.
It will scale itself accordingly to take advantage of whatever resources
that you have.  And being hardware-independent, Apple is porting the code
to run on Windows and perhaps other OSes in the future (OS/2?)

----
Calvin Cheng