Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!guido
From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Hey!  What about us, Mac+ users!
Message-ID: <523@sering.cwi.nl>
Date: 1 Jun 88 14:32:43 GMT
References: <11388@apple.Apple.Com>
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 33

In article <11388@apple.Apple.Com> dan@apple.UUCP (Dan Allen) writes:
>About DAs of the 70K size, written in MPW Pascal...
>[...]
>The party line today is to not write DAs that big: just write an
>application which **does** have its own A5 World, and use MultiFinder!

This is not the first time I notice that Apple has essentially given up
support for machines as "small" as a Megabyte.  Running MultiFinder on a
1M machine is not realistic.  It doesn't work with any interesting
program (Dan may read this as MPW or HyperCard, for the rest of you
folks, I really mean LightspeedC :-).  An unexpanded Mac+ (with HD) is
just fine for for my development needs, and apparently all that my
institute wants to afford for a while.  I'm not asking support for 128K
old ROM Macs; but surely the Mac+ (which is still sold!) deserves a
better future than being made obsolete by ever-growing system files and
other software.

I can see two reasons for this attitude at Apple:

	1) (malicious) They want to sell more Mac IIs.  What would be
	   more appropriate than to gradually make the software to big
	   or too slow for the smaller models...
	
	2) (naive) All programmers at Apple have Mac IIs on their desks
	   and have forgotten about all those users who can't afford an
	   upgrade on a one-year old machine.

PS: don't tell me that using MultiFinder on a Mac+ is doable.  It isn't,
for any serious purpose.

--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net