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Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

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Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#71

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
musicale wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgra…

Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model. I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.

Well they did exactly that - rewriting the Finder in C++, etc.

But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more so today (especially for the vast amount of legacy C code.)

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#72

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
musicale wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgra…

Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model. I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.

> MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.

According to Wikipedia, the first commercial C++ implementation came out in October of 1985, MPW was released in September of 1986, and MPW C was released in July of 1987.

C++ seems to have been added sometime in ~1988 (??)

Think C 4.0 (later Symantec C/C++) with (C++ like) object extensions seems to have been released for the Mac in 1989.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#73

Post by taneq »

adrian_b wrote: post #59
taneq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your ‘small tablet’ approach different to a trackpad? Do you use the tablet screen somehow? Sounds interesting!

It has no resemblance whatsoever with a trackpad. I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface. These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse. The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I ca…

Aaah right, thanks for the explanation! I had read 'tablet' as 'iPad type thing', not 'Wacom type thing'. That sounds really effective, I might give it a go.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#74

Post by pjmlp »

musicale wrote: post #72
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model. I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.

> MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++. According to Wikipedia, the first commercial C++ implementation came out in October of 1985, MPW was released in September of 1986, and MPW C was released in July of 1987. C++ seems to have been added sometime in ~1988 (??) Think C 4.0 (later Symantec C/C++) with (C++ like) object extensions seems to have been releas…

You missed the MacApp part for doing Mac OS development.

And the later collaboration with Metrowerks and the PowerPlant framework.

I mentioned the podcast, because Wikipedia is not the source of universal truth.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#75

Post by pjmlp »

musicale wrote: post #71
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model. I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.

Well they did exactly that - rewriting the Finder in C++, etc. But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more s…

Most C++ frameworks always had ways to do bounds checking, but yeah disabling with profiling data has always been an issue.

Until governments and companies decided fixing CVEs was getting too expensive.

Then programming with straightjacket languages suddenly is the new future.

Until AI came to be, now it is a mess again.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#76

Post by simondotau »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #66
simondotau wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that being designed around the singular task of word processing would have made it a platform/ecosystem failure, even if was a nominally successful one-off product. The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.

Even the 128k was reasonably successful commercially. Hundreds of thousands of units sold, which was quite good for the time. Inflation-adjusted, it cost quite a bit more than the Vision Pro. They sold the same model with very minor revisions (512, then 512e) into mid-1987. The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change thin…

I agree with you about the Plus/SE, but the very existence of these products was a direct result of it being a successful ecosystem. As you correctly point out, the 128k/512k sold impressively well considering its high price. This was possible because it was an ambitious product, which Raskintosh was not.

Let's be clear, Raskintosh isn't the Macintosh that history eventually proved successful. What Raskin wanted was a significantly simpler and cheaper machine, more squarely pitted against offerings from Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore. Not to mention Apple's own array of ecosystem failures, such as Apple III, Lisa, IIGS, or indeed Newton.

Based on the raw odds, plus hindsight, I contend it would have been an ecosystem failure even if it saw some sales success. By not reaching for the stars, it would have been yet another in a long line of quirky mid-eighties, commercially successful, but short-lived platforms.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#77

Post by labrador »

adrian_b wrote: post #46
labrador wrote: post #27

Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.

Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false. That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.) I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have gr…

He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing

That's what I was referring to

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#78

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
musicale wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++. According to Wikipedia, the first commercial C++ implementation came out in October of 1985, MPW was released in September of 1986, and MPW C was released in July of 1987. C++ seems to have been added sometime in ~1988 (??) Think C 4.0 (later Symantec C/C++) with (C++ like) object extensions seems to have been releas…

You missed the MacApp part for doing Mac OS development. And the later collaboration with Metrowerks and the PowerPlant framework. I mentioned the podcast, because Wikipedia is not the source of universal truth.

I was just trying to put the timeline together, as C++ doesn't seem to have been particularly production-ready when MPW was released (though I could imagine it had fans anyway.) Also Think C has been mentioned on HN a few times.

I looked at the intro to some of the MPW C++ documentation (before posting above, thank you internet) and I think it said that MacApp could be used via the C++ to Object Pascal bridge and that a native C++ framework would be forthcoming.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#79

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #75
musicale wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they did exactly that - rewriting the Finder in C++, etc. But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more s…

Most C++ frameworks always had ways to do bounds checking, but yeah disabling with profiling data has always been an issue. Until governments and companies decided fixing CVEs was getting too expensive. Then programming with straightjacket languages suddenly is the new future. Until AI came to be, now it is a mess again.

> programming with straightjacket languages

I wish Ada had more high-quality open source compilers and libraries, since it seems easier to write than Rust.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

II2II wrote: post #29
simondotau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.

The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place. Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes t…

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