Re: [NTLK] [OT] Bigger than iWalk

From: BK (bk_newtontalk_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jan 07 2002 - 09:25:08 EST


On Monday, January 7, 2002, at 08:19 , Robert Benschop wrote:

>
> on 07-01-2002 11:28, BK at bk_newtontalk_at_yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> Now, how about desktop computers ? Nothing like it ! Even a brand new
>> box with a brand new OS will crash on you like a 20 year old run down
>> rusty heap of junk on four wheels. Even if you have an IT department
>> that is paid to look after your computers permanently, there is not a
>> single day in which there is not someone at work who has his "Oh my
>> god,
>> I just lost 30 minutes of work due to a computer glitch" experience. A
>> car would be considered troublesome if that happened once a month.
>
> What kind of computer do you use, sound terrible and nothing close to my
> experience, and my Cube gets his mileage...

In the above paragraph I was talking about corporate environments of
companies I have been working for, which most of the time would have
been Wintel boxes with some flavour of the Windoze family of Noperating
Systems on them and mostly MediocreSoft Junkware installed.

Yes, internet related software is often involved when it comes to
crashes or freezes but what excuse is this ? The internet is now part of
office life and therefore I expect the software to work. Heck, it works
on Unix boxes - there isn't any excuse.

> Actually the only thing where the Macintoshes that I've owned closely
> resemble my Newtons in their behavior is that they both very rarely
> crash
> but if they do it's generally internet related.

Absolutely true, the Mac has always been more reliable than Wintel, but
if you are used to working on VAXstations and VAXclusters, where the
only reason for unscheduled downtime would have been some kind of
disaster, with software that recorded every of your keystrokes into a
journal file so as to reapply it to a previous version of your document
in the unlikely event that there was a problem ...

if you have been working on the legendary Tandem Himalaya, seeing with
your own eyes how CPUs are being removed while your user process was
running on that CPU pair and survives, seeing with your own eyes how
memory was removed while your user process had data stored on that
memory bank and no data is lost, seeing with your own eyes how a rolling
operating system upgrade is taking place on 4000 CPU pairs while all
users are working on it and all goes smoothly ...

if you have been playing on a Lisp system trying to bring it to its
knees by calculating the factorial of 100000, or Ackerman of (2,3)
responding a few dozen times to a message "Stack overflow - Do you want
to continue ? - OK, Stack has been enlarged - continuing ...", waiting
two hours for "Result calculated - Now formatting for output ..." and
seeing a flood of endless digits rushing over the screen in an attempt
by the system to tell you the exact figure which happens to have a
bazillion digits each one of which is being displayed as a matter of
standard functionality ...

if you have a Unix workstation at home which once had cost 30000$, no
spec and no part of which is nearly as fancy as any of the above but
still in the order of magnitudes more stable than any Mac or Windoze box
even after it is well past its expiry date ...

if you have a Newton, which many people think of as a flopped oversized
electronic scribble board, but you realise from your experience with
legendary million dollar hardware that despite it being so tiny it is
perfectly on par with that Lisp workstation that once made such a
lasting impression on you and seemed like an artefact of a
super-intelligent alien species from outer space ...

THEN, you ***don't*** think that this Mac with its legacy OS is stable
or sophisticated, no matter how much edge it may have over the common
Wintel junk out there.

The Newton OS is far more sophisticated than the legacy MacOS, probably
even more sophisticated than OSX. And I am not talking about the GUI,
which is of course not as fancy as most desktop systems because it was
designed for a PDA and as such IMO the best GUI for that purpose.

However, on the desktop, OSX has made a big difference for me. I am
finally 10 years back in time, which paradox as it may seem is a big
leap forward. The OSX GUI may be ground breaking in various aspects and
I like it a lot, but the OS is not all that ground breaking. But that is
perfectly OK because in the desktop world operating systems have been in
a steady decline since at least the early 90s.

The Newton OS on the other hand was and probably still is ground
breaking. Who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years it will be referred to
like today we refer to the Xerox Parc stuff and the Apple Lisa.

The legacy Mac OS will be remembered for its GUI design, no doubt, but
for reliability/stability ? I doubt that. And what will Windoze be
remembered for ? 50000 official bugs at release ? Controversy ? Hype ?
At best it will be remembered for excellent marketing skills. Certainly
it won't be remembered as a piece of proper engineering, more likely as
an example of how to make every possible bad design decision and how to
then badly implement it. But as Bill Gates said it himself "That doesn't
matter".

'nuff said


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