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From: mdavis@pro-sol.cts.COM (Morgan Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: AMACS, Misc...
Message-ID: <8806222136.AA00356@crash.cts.com>
Date: 22 Jun 88 19:51:48 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: pnet01!pro-sol!mdavis@nosc.mil
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 32

Sean Kamath laments at the price of AMACS, while getting it all wrong in the
process.  AMACS sells for $75, but it's worth about $279.  It is a VERY
accurate implementation of EMACS/Jove/GNU/whatever.  It is ProDOS based, fast,
and extremely powerful.

Sean Kamath laments at the speed of the IIGS (which he obviously doesn't
own).  Using a standard 20mb hard disk, I can boot into ProDOS 16 in about 9
seconds (that includes booting PRODOS, P16, SYSTEM.SETUP stuff, Guy Rice's
SYSBEEP with a 53-block digitized sampling of the roadrunner, David Lyons's
Nifty-List CDA with the LARGE data file, and my own START program which
invokes APW for me down in a subdirectory).  Nine-point-six seconds is all:
from Control-Apple-RESET until my START program runs.

Many wonderful things are in store for GS/OS, which is the official name for
ProDOS 16 v2.0.  Apple picked a different name because GS/OS is a whole new
beast, a complete rewrite.

I'll be the first to stand in line for a IIGS speed-up card, but things are a
bizillion times slower, sluggish, harder to work on, and downright painful
back in the IIe and IIc world.

And, by the way, I am less impressed by the hacker types who are so proud of
the fact that they wrote some amazing code using only crufty tools (i.e. the
mini-assembler, or Big Mac), than I am when I see something very complex
performed with both grace and elegance.

--Morgan Davis

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