Pournelle: The Lion Sleeps Tonight

I updated the OS a bit over a week ago. I of course had full system backups (as always), so that wasn't a concern. Prerequisites of hardware and software were not a worry (no PPC only programs, but bare minimum hardware). Still, there's always some caution with an update-in-place. But not to worry, it all went quickly and smoothly.

The new software has been a delight. Not just the announced changes, the unadvertised tweaks are a constant pleasure. The whole system seems smoother and more responsive.

One caveat. I have seen a couple of 3rd party apps that need updating. Perhaps it's because they're the rare 32 bit instance in a 64 bit environment. When they ran, memory management seemed a bit less adroit. I'm not naming them, yet, to give the vendors time to fix the issue(s).

All in all, I'm very pleased with the OS 10.7 upgrade. The sense of fun has been increased!

I must agree with Dr. Pournelle that the first Macs were woefully underpowered. While I got into Mac fairly early(MacSE), I continued to use an Osborne I with an external monitor for years because of Wordstar. MacWrite was cute, but not really useful.

I put up a set of 1984 Macintosh photos for you to use.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/s...

Credit:
Steve Garfield CC BY-NC-SA

You win the Most Obvious Comment of the Thread Award. Yes, software isn't perfect and you'll always be able to find anecdotes about somebody's mother-in-law completely hosing her system during an upgrade. Waiting, doing nothing, will guarantee you won't have install problems, but also means you'll never get new features. My point that talking about Lion as some sort of Vista Redux is unjustified. Sure, wait for 10.7.1 if you want; heck, wait for 10.7.5 if you're really nervous, but know that the App Store-based upgrade was solid from day one for the vast, vast majority of Mac users.

Macintosh Pascal (sold by Apple, but developed by THINK Technologies) compiled the Pascal source to a byte code, then interpreted the byte code.

The successor product Lightspeed Pascal (developed and sold by THINK Technologies) compiled to 68000 machine code. It was originally named to match Lightspeed C; they were renamed THINK Pascal and THINK C after a trademark dispute, and kept those names after THINK Technologies was acquired by Symantec.

By comparison with modern theses, it's very slim. My supervisor (an FRS) set a limit of 20,000 words plus figures and tables on separate pages from the text (still the best approach if you use Word rather than LaTeX); he felt that if you couldn't say it in that many words, it wasn't worth saying (he was pretty blunt). His limits equated to 100 pages of double-spaced 12 pitch typescript (plus unnumbered pages containing figures and tables, which were slipped in after the page of text on which they were first referenced). I recommended this approach to a colleague who was writing up his D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, so not a Ph.D.), so he just banged out the text in Word, drew his figures, generated his tables, then pulled the lot together after printing. He reckoned that it saved him days compared to fighting Word as it floated figures and tables to the wrong places in the text, *repeatedly*.

The old BYTE used to have a regular Mac column (forgotten the name of the author, alas), and he reviewed Boston II -- it was a bitmap font designed to give the cleanest reproduction on the dot-matrix ImageWriter, with various special characters, including a subset of Greek, based on a frequency count of the characters used in scientific papers. Being a bitmap (as all Mac fonts were at the time, outline fonts only existing down on the stratospherically-priced LaserWriter), you could edit it yourself with ResEdit, so I altered the shape of the lowercase gamma to something I preferred. At the time, the only other computer-prepared thesis in the lab was done on a Commodore 64, with a a Canon dot-matrix printer.

And be careful what you wish for -- you might just get a scanned copy of my thesis in your email (150 dpi would probably do it, because it was printed at 144 dpi; and I do know that the scan should *really* be above the Nyquist frequency of 288 dpi).

Oh, one last bit of advice I had from my supervisor: write down your chapter titles, headings, and subheadings (never let the numbering get more than three levels deep), then decide which figures and tables go under which (sub)headings. Now write your text within that context, connecting those elements together. And never forget that you're telling a story, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Uh, just because your 2 installs went smoothly doesn't mean everyone's will. There certainly have been reports of problems, so waiting a bit makes sense if there's no pressing reason to upgrade.

@MJBauer said, “the Mac only offered a version of Pascal that was interpreted” but that doesn't ring true.

The UCSD Pascal System was one of the 3 OS versions on the original IBM PC, and was available (developed first for?) the Apple ][. Those were absolutely interpreted. But Mac Pascal, as well as some 3rd-party versions (Borland and THINK) that also sprang up were compiled.

Most PC code-writers of the time hated the verbosity of Pascal, especially in the Mac where the OS supplied function names that could be multiple words smushed together, in contrast to c's use of terse symbols. And one or two typos or other little errors could produce a cascade of error messages, most of which were irrelevant. Many programmers really disliked the process. (Myself, I relished how the language prevented me from doing stupid things that I wouldn't find out until after I'd shipped my work.) The speed problem was not that the code was interpreted bit-by-bit as they ran, it was that Mac programs, in drawing every little dot on screen, did a lot more work than their character-based cousins on the CP/M and DOS side.

On the point of the original article, most of this history merely identifies that Apple has long had ITS way of doing things; they were happy to choose a less-favored language as necessary for coding if it meant that programmers could structure the very large, complex programs to control typeface size, placement, etc in ways that PCs ignored.

And to the point of Lion: there are ALWAYS glitches in upgrades; beta testers see the most; early adopters some; Point-Oh-One upgraders fewer still; those who wait until they buy a new machine with the OS preinstalled the fewest. My take is that Lion today is mostly about cosmetics but that when 3rd parties get Lion's auto-save, sharing and other iCloud-oriented features in place there will be an explosion of very attractive reasons to make sure you have it running.

I'd love to see your PhD work. (Ha. Am working on mine now and would love to see it for encouragement : ) Thanks for your comments and stopping by in our second week of BYTE, ajcarr.

I bought the first 128k Mac back in 1984, no external floppy drive, (and I didn't get a HD until I bought a 20 MB SCSI Rodime to go with the replacement Mac Plus five years later). Despite the RAM and floppy restrictions, I was able to write X-ray diffraction software in Modula-2 using compiler from Modula Systems/Modula Research Corporation. And I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on it using MacWrite and the Boston II font designed by Charles Maurer, printed on an ImageWriter dot-matrix-printer; my supervisor thought it was the best-looking thesis yet produced in the lab.

Email him and ask him. Just to clarify -- I'll put something in the cutline this weekend about DWM's Macs being Color Classics. I thought it was obvious from the pics they weren't original Macs, but yeah. We should be clearer. Thanks for pointing that out, guys! gs

I wonder if Mr. Pournelle's first hands on experience with a Mac was at the Byte Show in LA in about 1984? I was at that show and seem to remember Jerry at the Apple booth playing with an original Mac. Hand on the mouse he mumbled something like, "I don't need no trash can...." I didn't get a chance with that Mac, but watching Jerry play with the toy made me decide to buy one.

Jerry had nothing to do with the pics used. He filed the column. I thought it needed some art. I didn't want to use some junk from Flickr. Nothing against Flickr, but I like to use original photos you'll only find on BYTE. These came courtesy of our Apple Lion reviewer, David W. Martin. Just thought you'd like to see some old Macs! : )

Trouble installing Lion? You've got to be kidding. I upgraded two machines yesterday, one a Mini server which entailed an additional download, and I can't remember a more uneventful OS upgrade in my 30 years of PC use. I see no reason to tar OS X with the same Windows brush and counsel waiting for the first major update (SP in Windows speak); this is a solid release. Aside for some UI changes, notably to the mouse/trackpad gestures, that non-Apple apps don't yet support (yes, I'm talking about you, Chrome), the upgrade has been remarkably smooth. Jump into the Lion's den, the water's fine.

Y'know I have to believe Jer' knows that's not a pic of the original Mac in the column - and he may have had nada to do with the illo's used.

That's not just a mea culpa - While, I'm happy to see a publication with Byte's mission back, and especially with my fave author from the original, rough edges - e.g., the Mac column that had to be disasvowed and was then left up - with the disavowal and the original piece in still-readable strikethrough .

Some said it was linkbait to get people back to Byte, others just bad editorial judgement - and to only include pictures of another Mac not even referenced in the column is at best sloppy and amateurish.

But I do hope the missteps turn out to only have been baby steps and that the publication prospers, if it hews to what it can be - in the spirit of what it once was.

Sorry, but the Mac in your pictures is certainly NOT the "original Mac". It is the Color Classic, which was the second to last Mac to use that upright form factor.

I bought a 128k Mac after becoming frustrated with 8 bit machines from Atari and Commodore that I owned. I looked at PCs before buying a Mac, and found that their graphics were worse then the 8 bit machines, and they could do nothing obviously better. It would take PCs 6 years before they could match the WYSIWYG graphics and printing of the 128k Mac, and even then third party extras were required to make it work.

Dr Pournelle, I found your column even handed but your history left a bit to be desired. The original Mac was a toy? Yes, as was the original IBM PC when it came out. Not long after we acquired our first Mac we acquired an IBM PC/XT for about $3500. So using a price point without a reference is a bit misleading

Why? Simple we were porting mini-computer apps (Data Point and Prime) to a PC and the Mac only offered a version of Pascal that was interpreted and we could write on the PC with a compiled language. We much preferred the Mac's but we were a business and needed to come up with a slightly faster way to work and also more easily install our software.

BTW, the Lisa had a nice spreadsheet program (LisaCalc as I recall) which was my first real experience with an electronic spreadsheet.

Also, as a one time subscriber to Byte wish you look