NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/comp/sys/apple2/25376

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-11 | 11.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Matt Deatherage)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: The Apple II Now and Forever
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 12 Dec 92 02:31:51 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Followup-To: comp.sys.apple2
Organization: Developer Support Center, Apple Computer, Inc.
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Todd P.
Whitesel) wrote some stuff.

OK, let's look at these things.  There's a few misunderstandings here.

1)  Remember how this started?  Hal implied "The original IIgs team wanted
to do X, but Apple wouldn't let them."  I said "I don't see how you can
know that, because you weren't there."  (Neither was I, for those who
don't know, but I know a lot of people who were and I have no evidence
that it was true.)  You said "Ah, the old discredit defense.  When will
you admit that people didn't have to be there to understood what
happened?"  I followed with "You don't have to read Moby Dick to write
a book report on it, and it's just as likely to be accurate."

(The above paraphrase is, of course, as I see things.)

In the nearly five years I've been doing whatever-it-is-that-I-do, I've
seen an incredible amount of speculation about what goes on behind
the scenes at Apple.  The vast majority of that speculation is, to the
best of my knowledge, flat-out wrong.  For example, in the MacWEEK forum
on CompuServe last night I saw someone speculating "The reason Apple
hasn't put [Macintosh] Network Software Installer 1.3 on ftp.apple.com
yet is because they want us all to use AppleLink and pay those outrageous
fees."

The truth, as most readers here can probably guess, is that Mark Johnson
runs the ftp site in his spare time and he hasn't had time to HQX and
upload the new disk, which is only a few weeks old.

Most of the speculation I see is like that.  The big one of years gone
by, which is slightly re-emergent today, is "The Apple IIgs team wanted
to make the machine much more powerful but Apple wouldn't let them
because it would endanger the Macintosh."  Now, while the employment
agreement doesn't let me talk about anything that might or might not
have been a product, I am as sure as I'm ever going to get that no
features were removed from the original IIgs to protect the Macintosh.

_Hundreds_ of people think they have enough expertise to guess that
what I just said isn't true.  My personal experience shows me that it
is.  That's what I mean when I identify things as speculation and
try to dismiss them, even if I can't talk about all the details.

> I do however take issue with your tendency to simply ridicule people because
> you cannot disclose the actual facts that prove them wrong. Perhaps you have
> never considered this, but the person being ridiculed usually is not the
> source of the information, and probably heard it from somebody they thought
> they could trust. No matter what the circumstances, the last thing they need
> to hear is an authority like yourself essentially smugging them off the net!
>

I suppose I could replace "That's silly" with "Whoever told you that is
being silly," but if someone posts something as if they are the author,
I have no way to know they're not, and I don't want to imply people
on here aren't capable of original thought (or even highly demented
thought, which is much more desirable).

Hal's original post said something like "Apple wanted to ...."  Not
"According to reports" or "I heard" or "It's been said", but stated
as fact he had personal knowledge of.

> [shortcomings of system software]

Note:  We weren't originally talking about this; we were talking about
whether people who weren't "there" can accurately know what went on
inside Apple.  However, since you bring it up:

There are generally two kinds of criticism of the system software:  "This
is broken, this isn't fast enough, this doesn't work right with that"
criticism are usually valid, usually bugs, etc.  Even some design issues
fall into this, like "There should have been arbitration of DOC RAM" and
"You should be able to uniquely identify GS/OS devices."

The _other_ kind is usually "Apple should have done X but they didn't
because they weren't serious about the Apple IIgs."  (Sometimes this
stops after "Apple should have done X", sometimes not.)  These criticisms
I generally don't find to be valid.

"TextEdit should scroll horizontally."  Yeah, it should -- and what that's
already in the system would you like to do without to make the engineering
effort available to do it?  "We should have had HFS and MS-DOS read-write
FSTs in 1988."  Maybe so -- maybe there should have been 500 Apple IIgs
engineers and everything should have been ready in 1985.  In reality,
resources are limited and if I had to make the decisions about what got
done and what didn't, I'm not sure I wouldn't have decided the same way.

I find a lot of criticisms of the system to fall into this latter
category of "I think Apple should have done different things with the
IIgs."  You can think that, go ahead -- I think that in some cases.
I generally find the decisions that engineering made about what to
do with the resources they have to be quite solid, and those I'm
perfectly willing to defend.

> But I can't and never have
> claimed to tell you what goes on at Apple as if I had secret agent
> equipment hidden in every cube!! Only you seem to believe that I am
> saying that.

No, I didn't say you did, either.  We were originally talking about
"The Apple II team  wanted to make the first IIgs multitasking but
Apple wouldn't let them."  No one who wasn't there can know if that's
true or not, but from what I know I don't believe it to be true.

> if you spent more brain power
> analyzing what you read, you'd waste less of it in replying to things the
> author quite evidently never intended!!

"Ha!", he says, in his best Jon Lovitz voice.  "You've never worked in
DTS!"

Some days in this job you get the strangest, most absurd questions you
can possibly imagine from developers.  You'll read them about ten times
and you'll say "They can't possibly mean this, they mean this other
thing."  So you answer the other thing, which is an eminently reasonable
question, and you get back a huge flamer saying "I DIDN'T ASK YOU THAT!"

Most of the time, there's been a misunderstanding way up the thought
chain and the programmer is lost on the wrong branch of the tree.  He
doesn't know this, of course, so he asks a question at the twig-level
and not at the trunk-level.  So you answer the question at the twig-level
and, surprise!  It doesn't solve the problem.  So you ask what the
trunk-level problem is, and you backtrack, and eventually you get to
where the thought error happened.  You've probably seen this on GEnie
in more than one case -- "Can you tell us more about what you're trying
to do with this so we can suggest some alternate strategies?"

There was a _great_ example of this on GEnie (and on AOL too) just this
past week from a new Apple IIgs programmer, who asked "Can I call
ModalDialog with a filter procedure from an NDA?  When I do, it crashes."
Those who are into this know there's no reason that it shouldn't work,
so we asked him to give us more details.  As it turned out, he was
converting it from an application and was calling StartUpTools for
all the standard application tools from within his NDA's Open routine.
This is apt to cause all kinds of trouble, but (of course) he had no
idea this was a problem at all.

Experience shows me that if we _hadn't_ answered the twig-level question
("Can you use filterProcs from ModalDialog in an NDA?"), he wouldn't have
been happy until we did.  The authoritative "Yes, something else must
be wrong" satisfied him, but sometimes it doesn't.

I have no problems admitting that this newsgroup normally tires me out,
and I don't read any messages except those with interesting titles.  I
sometimes lose patience because there are a lot of people reading this
who have a lot of time on their hands and therefore assume that I must
have a lot of time as well.  Saying "No, something else must be wrong,
what else are you doing" is just as likely to produce a flame war as
it is to start something useful.  That's why, on here, generally I
restrict myself to correcting errors I see elsewhere or answering twig-
level questions.  There are questions on here that could be answered
on GEnie (or AOL or elsewhere) with a minimum of back-and-forth, but
it never happens that way here.  People come in and complain that I
should have given a full answer the first time, or someone comes in and
suggests something completely irrelevant and starts flaming when it's
suggested that this is completely irrelevant, or in some documented cases
it produces a stream of Email to my personal account at the rate of two
technical questions per day for about eight weeks.

So sometimes on here we don't get past the twig-level question.  That's
regrettable, but that's the dynamics of this group.  It's different on
the commerical services, because for some reason people take their time
more seriously when they're paying for it.  It might be different on
the net if comp.sys.apple2.programmer had passed, and I hope that when
it's eligible for voting again in February that people will pass it
this time, because the lack of it _does_ keep people like me from
giving more in-depth technical help on here, because I always regret it
in the end.

(I'm probably going to regret having said this much, too, but at least
I could redirect flames to alt.i.hate.matt.)

> This is the FIRST time I've ever
> heard you mention that somebody else at Apple disagrees with your version
> of history.

If I have personal knowledge of something, I say it as fact.  If I don't,
I say it as opinion ("I believe," "I have no evidence," etc.)  If this
is not true, it's a mistake on my part, because I intend to do it this
way.

> where
> somebody attacks a weak spot in the system and your response just diffuses
> their question with virtually ZERO information content.

When it comes to "Why did Apple decide to do X instead of Y," most of the
time I can't tell you, even if I do know (mostly I do, sometimes I
don't, sometimes I've been told but I find it hard to believe).  I can
see how trying to answer this without revealing things I can't could be
seen as providing zero information content -- but in those cases the
point is usually "It's not that easy a decision."

> And if they manage to set off one
> of your infamous red flags in their initial post, well you might as well let
> somebody else answer. This doesn't get THEM much of anywhere, and they don't
> even know what they did wrong.

My #1 red flag is repetition -- I absolutely can't stand having to answer
the same questions over and over, which is one reason I've written so
many Technical Notes.  If comp.sys.apple2.programmer passes, I hope there's
a good FAQ list.

> Todd Whitesel
> toddpw @ cco.caltech.edu

============================================================================
Matt Deatherage, Developer Support Center, Apple Computer, Inc.
Personal mail only -- please POST technical questions, questions about
Apple and its policies, where to find documents and related inquiries.
The opinions I express don't represent Apple, which makes us both happy.
============================================================================