Mac vs. Windows vs. OS/2 vs. OSF/Motif vs. NeXT-step vs. ...

Jul 24 03:09 UTC 1992

I know this may sound like the old Mac vs. the PC re-kindled, but there
seem to be alot of similarities and some major differences between the
big GUI and OS players in the Mac and PC world.  DOS is getting ever closer
to the grave and Windows is destined to be the next PC operating system.

What are the good points and bad points of each interface?
Which interface is easier to use by new people?
Which interface offers the most flexibility and power to experienced people?
Which interface is "best", in your opinion, and WHY? (please give reasons)

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For the record, I think Windows has a slight edge.  I have used both and
prefer the infinite configuration possibilities and like the 3d look of
Windows.  For a new user, I wouldn't recommend it, as setting it up is a
royal pain in the ass (PITA).  Some things on the Mac interface aren't as
"intuitive" as Apple would have you think.  I have a friend that swears by
OS/2 2.0 as beating both by combining the best of both worlds.  OS/2's 
handicap is that it has "IBM" stamped on it.

response 2 of 155:

Jul 24 03:49 UTC 1992

Most definitely.  I just about forget that its not part of standard Windows.
Desktop makes a big difference, and in version 2.0, doesn't make that much
of a difference in performance, either.  TrueType is a better, speedier
alternative to Adobe Font Manager, but you have to have Win v3.1.

response 4 of 155:

Jul 24 16:32 UTC 1992

Windows is great -- for a DOS app.  But it lacks several features that
Motif and Open Look have.  One of the worst missing features, IMHO,
is a "focus follows mouse" mode (instead of "click to focus").  Under
Motif and Open Look, you can set up the window manager so that whichever
window contains the mouse also has the input focus (i.e., is the active
window).  You can switch the focus simply by moving the mouse; the
active window does not necessarily have to be the one at the top
of the window stack.  Especially on the small (both resolution-wise
and real-estate-wise) screens found on PCs, it's nice to be able to
type in a partially obscured window.

Unfortunately, X11 has its own problems; most notably, the fact that
it needs about 20MB of disk space and 16MB of memory to perform
well.  That's over and above what the OS itself requires (which is
usually on the order of 30MB of disk and 2MB-3MB of RAM).  It would
be nice if USL had implemented an "X11 lite" to go with their "Unix
lite" offering (aka Destiny, aka SVR4.2).  X11 is really, really powerful,
but it's also big and klunky and difficult to configure.  (What novice
computer user would like to have to edit something called a "resource
database file" to change configuration issues like which colors an
application uses?)

The Mac GUI, IMHO, is underpowered.  Even worse than Windows.  This
is exacerbated by the small screens found on most Macs.  The Macs
that I've used -- Macintosh LC's with 40MB hard drives -- were slow,
the screen resolution was low, and it was difficult to get anything
done.  Who wants to have to pull down five menus just to italicize
some text, anyway?

One more comment about Motif vs. Open Look: IMHO, Open Look is a better
interface.  Unfortunately Sun has handicapped it by making a distribution
license about two orders of magnitude more expensive than the Motif
distribution license.  Guess which one gets shipped with most Unix
boxes?  Sun, to their credit, has allowed the olwm (Open Look Window
Manager) and XView toolkit sources to be distributed with the X11
sources, whereas OSF still insists that people pay for Motif source.
(So much for the "Open" Software Foundation...)

response 6 of 155:

Jul 25 13:16 UTC 1992

Windows NT is supposed to REPLACE DOS and COMMAND.COM.  I would surely hope 
that they'd include a command line interpreter for those of us who sometimes
like that mode of computing.

response 8 of 155:

Jul 25 17:07 UTC 1992

I think everybody is going to forget about all those mac msoft window projects
and go with xwindows at the end.

response 10 of 155:

Jul 25 22:29 UTC 1992

(This is a little off-track, but I find Ric's comments on the small
size of the Amiga OS and user interface very interesting.  I often
wonder if the huge memory and disk requirements of modern operating
environments are really all that necessary, and suspect bad design
and sometimes -- taking the paranoid view -- collusion between the
people who write software and the people who sell hardware.)

response 12 of 155:

Jul 26 01:00 UTC 1992

  In the case of X, I suspect it's a case of trying to be all things
to all people..  Much of the same code has to compile on a zillion different
platforms and it has to behave consistently across many different machine
types, so for a large part of it there is very little opportunity to tailor
the system to the particular aptitudes of the system it will be running on.

  MS Windows, I suspect, also suffers from this syndrome, having to support
a wide array of display and output devices (plus it has to step lightly
since MS-DOS wasn't designed with it in mind..)  However, I also suspect
that Windows suffers a great deal from typical Microsoft software bloat..
They usually wind up turning out product that works nicely (after several
major revisions and literally dozens of bug-fix versions) but at the same
time their products tend to be huge and inefficient..

  The Macintosh Finder and the AmigaDos Workbench are both relatively small
compared to X, Windows, the Presentation Manager, etc.. in part because they
can make certain assumptions about the hardware they will be expected to
run on and tailor themselves to work best on those platforms.  As hardware
options for those computers become more numerous, too, their windowing 
systems are growing larger..  The current version of Workbench and AmigaDos
aren't usable on my old 512K Amiga 1000 and things are only going to get
bigger..

response 14 of 155:

Jul 26 18:15 UTC 1992

 (well, I was attempting to be generous..  perhaps it's all Microsoft bloat..)

response 16 of 155:

Jul 27 05:19 UTC 1992

re #13: Microsoft sales dept. rep. told me that Windows 3.1 will
run on a [Novell] network.  It can be run with Win31 on the File
server w/config files on local drive or in a user directory.

response 18 of 155:

Aug 6 22:58 UTC 1992

I think the major problem with Windows is that it is running on a
hardware architecture not designed well for such things.

(re way back when - Workbench and Amigados 2.0 *WILL* work on an A500
with only 512K of RAM, hell, I've got 1 meg of RAM, and when I have loaded
in Workbench, I still have a good 800K left).  It does slow down, that's
for sure.  I just think there is something about the old A1000 (being 6 years
old) that it doesn't like)

response 20 of 155:

Aug 7 12:14 UTC 1992

GUI's GUI's everywhere!  Apple was one of the first, DOS machines was
one of the last.  At this point in time, the Mac GUI is the smoothest
of the two.  Both have a lot of growing to do.  Mac because it's been
around a long time and has to break new ground without forgetting its
roots and Windows because it's the new kid on the block and needs to
loose its roots in DOS.

response 22 of 155:

Aug 9 02:09 UTC 1992

the mac interface is now 8 years old.  It looks very 2-dimensional compared
to the Windows or Unix equivalents(?).  Even Windows looks dated compared
to the Unix varients.  The interfaces of the future are on Unix systems.  The
Mac and the PC are too weak computationally to support them and any serious
applications.  Macs and PCs will continue to service PERSONAL computing needs,
but the high-end apps with the newest GUI's will be on Unix machines.

My only complaint with Windows is that its by Microsoft and is subsequently
about 3 Megs overweight.  My complaint with the Mac is that they pretend to
have invented the GUI, when in truth, they stole it from Xerox PARC.  Yeah,
stole.  You don't think Apple pays any royalties or fees to Xerox do you?

response 24 of 155:

Aug 9 07:13 UTC 1992

(The Xerox R&D center where it was developed was PARC, Palo Alto
Research Center.  I don't know what the interface itself was called.)