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I recall reading the edition of Byte where they investigated the Lisa (Byte used to do computers properly, I guess because each one was new and strange. They'd have the lid off to look at the circuitry, talk to the designers of hardware and OS and maybe even show you some example code).
I couldn't make head or tail of the thing. You moved a 'mouse' around which shifted a 'pointer' on the screen? And then what? How did you actually do anything? Where was the terminal so you could type stuff and get on with some work?
AppleII kit made much more sense; 6502, seriously hackish disk-OS code that did one thing if you jumped into a routine at point A and something completely other if you jumped in a few instructions later. Twisted genius. And the sodding reset button right by the return key.
Of course I 'got' it later. I bought an Amiga because they were just better than the x86 kit and I didn't want to do DTP which is what Macs were for. I'd done real typesetting and one fo(u)nt per page was quite enough thank you very much.
And then. And then there was this expensive black box made from unobtanium that ran an OS that did stuff. It came with a dictionary and a thing that could send 'electronic mail' with pictures and noises. Although you could only send those messages to other NeXT users and Bob help you if you were on a dial-up because even at 14k4 it took a while, cost a lot and tended to piss off the recipient for similar reasons.
I still have a NeXT; it's probably twenty years old, but that was the point that Jobs and his team made Unix work. Inasmuch as Unix has always mostly worked, but the work was to do with Unix, rather than it being a platform on which to do other things.
OSX is likely the most productive Unix workstation I've ever used. There's a bunch of things it does really quite badly, but they tend to be the things that involve Other People's Protocols. (Not really a valid excuse, but there we are.)
I couldn't make head or tail of the thing. You moved a 'mouse' around which shifted a 'pointer' on the screen? And then what? How did you actually do anything? Where was the terminal so you could type stuff and get on with some work?
AppleII kit made much more sense; 6502, seriously hackish disk-OS code that did one thing if you jumped into a routine at point A and something completely other if you jumped in a few instructions later. Twisted genius. And the sodding reset button right by the return key.
Of course I 'got' it later. I bought an Amiga because they were just better than the x86 kit and I didn't want to do DTP which is what Macs were for. I'd done real typesetting and one fo(u)nt per page was quite enough thank you very much.
And then. And then there was this expensive black box made from unobtanium that ran an OS that did stuff. It came with a dictionary and a thing that could send 'electronic mail' with pictures and noises. Although you could only send those messages to other NeXT users and Bob help you if you were on a dial-up because even at 14k4 it took a while, cost a lot and tended to piss off the recipient for similar reasons.
I still have a NeXT; it's probably twenty years old, but that was the point that Jobs and his team made Unix work. Inasmuch as Unix has always mostly worked, but the work was to do with Unix, rather than it being a platform on which to do other things.
OSX is likely the most productive Unix workstation I've ever used. There's a bunch of things it does really quite badly, but they tend to be the things that involve Other People's Protocols. (Not really a valid excuse, but there we are.)
