Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 08:03:15 -0500 From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: coredump@nervosa.com (invalid opcode), narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, jehamby@lightside.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <199602291303.IAA17070@wa3ymh.transsys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Feb 1996 17:52:37 MST." <199602290052.RAA09543@phaeton.artisoft.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > On Wed, 28 Feb 1996, Narvi wrote: > > > Talking about real good GUIs... How do you define one? Windows certainly > > > Sander > > > > NeXTStep. > > Why is it that all good ideas are never liked by the stupid human public. > > Because of the lame proprietary technology you have to license to > implement the idea (Display PostScript) and the lame idea of making > your computer run like a snail whenever you print by moving the > processing (PostScript) from the printer to the computer because > it's too expensive to implement any other way? You don't have to run the printer using the DPS interpreter on the NeXTSTEP platform. If you did, you got a printer that ran faster than most of the printers you could buy in that day. That is, you had a 68030 rendering, rather than the usual 68000 you'd find in the canonical Apple Laserwriter at the time. What you got at the time was a 400 dpi (hi res!) printer that ran faster than most. Of course, like diskless workstations, that was an economical optimization that doesn't make sense these days. I actually used an external NEC LC890 PostScript printer on my NextStation at home. > The GUI was cool, the "Objective C" was "Objectionable" (we'll just > define this *new* language so we don't have to learn C++ and because > we thing we can jack GCC into compiling it without giving the sources > out so it can be ported to other platforms). The browser was cool, > the "dock" was OK (I guess; it was pretty limited in the number of > apps it could contain), and the login screen was cool. I've done non-trivial application development in Objective-C, and I've got some friends who've done large Objective-C and C++ development work, and we all agreed that we prefer Objective-C. Too many bells and whistles in C++, plus the lack of dynamic binding. Of course, this is a flamefest in it's own right. The initial implementation of Objective C (I think in the 0.8 release) was still a preprocessor based on the StepStone complier. Things were much improved after GCC became a native compiler. > The initial lack of color really sucked. The use of mixed text and > binary databases for things sucked. The inability to use a remote > display sucked. The "Mach domain" sockets sucked. The need to > load apps from a server and run them locally instead of running on > an application server sucked. The lack of a floppy drive sucked. > The speed of the optical sucked. Yup, I have to agree with you on all accounts here. They lamed out on the OS support for the platform, and there was no reason all this stuff couldn't be better. I still lament the lack of a NextStep interface each and everytime I sit down in front of an (ugh!) X display with the lame-o excuse of a "GUI design". > The black cube was cool. The Motorolla DSP was cool. More than one > button on the mouse was cool (three would have been better). "Write Now" > was cool. The paint program was cool. If you saw the inside of WriteNow, you'd probably change your tune.. > The keyboard connector was cheap. The missing key in the "T" bar keys > was cheap. The power button was annoying (in combination, it made it > impossible to emulate a VT220 without using composition keys). > I can't see why developers didn't flock to it. 8-). It was actually one of the most inexpensive UNIX platforms you could buy at the time that didn't really suck or was a System V varient (or was both!) Louis Mamakos
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199602291303.IAA17070>