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From: grunwald@uiuccsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: MacIntosh and the Emporor's clothes - (nf)
Message-ID: <5396@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 5-Feb-84 22:31:32 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.5396
Posted: Sun Feb  5 22:31:32 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 05:17:43 EST
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#R:fortune:-241500:uiuccsb:4400036:000:1353
uiuccsb!grunwald    Feb  5 13:24:00 1984

    What I don't understand is their big university-oriented push and the
consequent interest in places like CMU, Harvard, Dartmouth and so on. It
does not seem to be the machine to require your students to buy.

    I like funky interfaces and everything, but christ, an M.E. student wants
to be able to solve ODE's (or whatever they use) for stress analysis. What good
is the integrated display for this? I imagine they'd rather have an FPU.

    For writers and managers who need to publish cute reports, I can understand
the appeal. But could you imagine using this as a software production machine?
It would take so much more work to develope a program like "make" in that
enivornment because you'd want to include all the human factors considerations.
In fact, with "make", you really don't need all that -- you just want it to
work and compile your programs for you.

    Now, I could see a multi-window, multi-tasking environment for program
development; however, with no memory management hardware, I don't think we'll
see it on the Mac for a while.

    It seems to be a system better aimed at the buisness departments of schools
instead of the engineering campuses. Unless they develope some interesting
packages for it, I think it'll mainly compete with the IBM PC market for
buisness use. But, I imagine it'll keep them afloat for a while.