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From: info-mac@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: Thoughts on what a new Finder should look like
Message-ID: <361@uw-beaver>
Date: Tue, 8-Jan-85 18:27:33 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.361
Posted: Tue Jan  8 18:27:33 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Jan-85 06:40:43 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 45

From: Michael Rubin 

I would bloody well hope the next Finder has real directories; a hard disk is
practically unusable without them.  The current Finder seems to have more
misfeatures than features.  You can't see file sizes or dates when "Viewing by
Icon", and you can't move or delete files in any other Viewing mode.  You can't
extend a selection across folder boundaries, to run a program on files that
happen to be in different folders.  You can't drop a file into a disk or folder
or Trash icon if the icon is opened; you have to move the file into its window
instead, even if the window is buried someplace.

Sometimes I wonder just what's in the Finder; it occupies 50K of code, and all
it does is display directories, move files and run programs.  The Bourne Shell
on a (68000-based) Unix system is only 28K, and contains a fair-sized
programming language....  You're right, most of the finder functions ought to
be in a desk accessory.

Regardless of what problems in the Finder are fixed, the Mac user interface is
still missing some important concepts due to its insistence that you're using
an appliance, not a (user-programmable) computer.  For example, the idea that
programs might want to talk to other programs as well as to humans.  "Scripts",
"shell programming" and "redirecting input and output" are meaningless because
all programs are assumed to be interactive applications, not filters that
process some input and produce some output according to some instructions.  The
only information the Finder can pass to a program is what data file(s) to
operate on -- and it's not even an ordered list, so you can't even write a
program to append one file to the end of another without dialog boxes.  The
notion of a file "belonging" to exactly one application is another lossage;
many types of files (e.g. program text) are produced by one application to be
used by another.

The Mac OS also seems to have been designed by somebody who was thinking of a
PDP-11-class machine with a fast hard disk.  The Segment Loader is a pretty
neat attempt to make a virtual-memory machine entirely in software; but virtual
memory requires a dedicated swap device, which is why the poor Mac has to keep
asking for its system disk back and the poor user has to sit through all those
swap delays.

Nobody ever accused Apple of being good at writing operating systems; we can
only hope that the worst faults aren't too deeply embedded to fix in a later
release.  Hopefully on January 24....

					(Waiting for the 1985 Super Bowl ad)
					--Mike Rubin 
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