I tried very hard to replace the Mac OS with a PPC Linux, but encountered some huge stumbling blocks, to wit:
- generic SCSI - doesn't work on G4s, so no Scanner
- smbfs - hard to find as a pre-compiled module, so no access to the NT Server directly
- no Appletalk client protocol AFAICT - so no accessing NT Appletask shares, or the other Macs directly
- Mac emulation limited - Mac on linux, www.maconlinux.org is still too slow for my purposes, while Executor www.ardi.com isn't out of beta yet for the PowerPC version.
- vector drawing quite primitive - Killustrator core dumped in just a few minutes of experimentation, while Sketch was a huge problem to install and once working had a not very efficient/elegant drawing UI (in comparison to, say FreeHand/Virtuoso, where with the pen tool selected, one can draw, move points (even as they're being placed), edit, etc. just by different modifier keys)
- pdf handling was kind of primitive, especially for printing, couldn't get the top part of a legal-sized.pdf placed properly on a lett-sized sheet, couldn't get it to fit-to-page either---is Adobe Acrobat ever going to have a.ppc Linux binary?
In the positive vein:
- it was nice to have a free TeX implementation
- LyX is awesome www.lyx.org
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, there was HP's NewWave, which was so disassociated from the filesystem it required special tools to copy to a floppy or other media---it is one of the four best UIs I've ever used though (the other three were/are PenPoint, Newton and NeXT/OPENstep).
Not bad for a shell on top of Windows.
It's unfortunate that Bill Gates found it so threatening.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Frater said:
``It's my experience that the current MacOS provides support for copy and paste of 'styled text', which includes font information. Is that what you're talking about?''
No, that's not what he's talking about.
I just had this discussion on CSMA, to re-cap, NeXTstep provides multiple pasteboards, one of these is controlled by 3 and 4, the former copies font _formatting_, the latter pastes said formatting onto the selected text, but doesn't otherwise change the text---very handy, with no equivalent in Mac OS per se, though character styles in apps pretty much obviates the need for it in those apps which support character styles.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, I've been using PPC Linux off and on for a while now, and do have the following benchmark (a largish TeX document provided by Christopher Eyrich)
>My results on a G4/400MHz ``Yikes!'' B&W G3 type motherboard >machine with a 10MB ATA HD using YellowDogLinux CS 1.1
Basically, the G4 was 10% or so faster than the similar speed x86 chips---and this with a (relatively) unoptimized kernel on the slowest motherboard (Yikes!==b/w G3)
Not sure how many people're using TeX, but it's a real world benchmark I happened to still have in my mail box....
William
-- Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
Actually, this sort of thing goes a bit further back than even GRiD Corporation (My first laptop was a GRiDCase III plus).
First, there was Go Corporation, and PenPoint (now owned by the MITI of Taiwan), and wonderful NCR-2125 and other systems, as well as the ill-fated Momenta (made the cover of Byte Magazine).
IBM's ThinkPad was originally to be a pen slate, and did eventually ship as one (the 730T), while they also had a convertible (the 360P), much like the GriD Convertible (later sold as the AST Executive when AST bought GRiD, but then they were bought by Tandy....)
What I really hope for is a system like to the Mitsubishy Amity VP/SP with a docking station which uses the pen slate unit as a display, but has a separate keyboard which can be mounted to the display/slate for travelling like the Compaq Concerto.
William
-- Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
Drat. Wish they'd chosen to give away the source to the Lighthouse Design suite of NeXT/OPENstep apps instead, much nicer and would've been a huge boost to
I finally managed to get it d/l'd, it installed easily enough, now I just need to setup CVS accesss through our Proxy here at work and hopefully I'll be all set.
It's not all that expensive switching to another platform, particularly not to Windows, since one can merely up-grade one's Mac apps at the next version to Windows ones (or vice versa). For fonts, one need merely purchase a ``sidegrade'' from the font vendor---Adobe is particularly nice about this.
For my part, a couple of years ago I got sick of Windows and the Mac OS and managed to get a NeXT Cube and still use it as my primary workstation, and far prefer it to the G4 or Pentium III at work.
I hope Mac OS X will live up to the legacy of OPENSTEP, but it still looks like NeXT users will have to give up a lot of things I value highly:
Movable main menu Tear off menus scroll bars on the left top-level print, hide and quit menus rich set of clients for services (how long/how much will it cost to put together an equivalent to Webster.app, Oxford's, Digital Shakespeare and Hacker.app?) Window controls which are always identifiable icons at the top of browser columns a shelf
To quote from John Warnock's Preface to ``The Purple Book'' _Programming the Display PostScript System with NeXTstep_,
"Adobe(R) and NeXTTM began joint development on PostScript software for displays---the Display PostScript(R) system---in 1985, soon after NeXT Computer, Inc. was founded.... The Display PostScript system was originally developed for the NeXT platform because Adobe and NeXT share a similar vision of the future of computing. Both see the advantage of having the same imaging model drive the display and the printer...." <BR> <BR> That's scarcely ``paying Adobe to develop DPS'' Also, DPS is available for X Window on Solaris, and is used in Xy Corporations XyVision products.<BR> <BR> Similarly, Quartz was developed entirely in-house by Apple---having had the rug pulled out from under them once with Adobe's renegging on their agreement for a free DPS license for the Yellow Box for Windows run-time, they could scarcely allow for the possibility of such an occurence again, no? <BR> <BR> William
Actually, one of the nicest of TeX implementations was done for NeXTstep, TeXView.app (provided as an example in/NextDeveloper/Demos in NeXTstep) along with InstantTeX (originally by Dmitri Linde, later expanded upon by various individuals).
Alan Hoenig, author of _TeX Unbound_ speaks highly of NeXTstep and the power of Display PostScript in his book and in articles in TugBoat (newsletter of the TeX User's Group, www.tug.org)
The problem with the.pdf implementation is that it takes away ones ability to effortlessly extend (for example) a drawing application with (arbitrary) PostScript code and have said code render on-screen.
Hopefully, InstantTeX or some successor to it and TeXView will be available for GNUstep and will then make it trivial to provide.pdfs for the unwashed masses. LyX, www.lyx.org looks very promishing for this sort of thing as well---though I hope someone 'stepifies the app---I want my vertical menus! support for services! etc.
William
Re:Random RISC OS trivia by an ex-user
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 1
Another UI which did drag-and-drop quite well was HP's NewWave....wonder where the code for it wound up? NeXTstep though, is the best UI I've yet encountered, and pleasantly, is also being re-created www.gnustep.org. William
Automated font installation for TeX would be really nice. However, that's a tough nut to crack---what sort of virtual font are you going to make? is the italic a genuine one? is the italic angle reported correctly? etc.
Similarly, the CMYK color thing is a tough one---who's going to finance the creation of the color tables? Color space work and look up tables are expensive, especially if one really wants it to work with any verisimilitude.
At a guess, this would be NeXT/OPENstep. www.next.com aliases to Apple's Enterprise software site. If one can score an old machine or copy of the OS, Apple is giving out free updates to NeXTstep 3.3 or OPENSTEP 4.2. William
I'd suggest two different words, ``Literate Programming''.
Dr. Knuth's work on this is wonderful, and if concepts like it had been more prevalent in the computer science course I took, I'd'be likely managed to've gotten a second major in CS in addition to my degree in art/graphic design.
William -- Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
I played NWN on AOL as well, and really enjoyed it (to the tune of ~100 hours per month at the rate of $4/hr., plus long distance charges). I was very dissappointed when the game was closed down and am glad to see it revived so---hopefully they'll balance playability, character advancement, etc. I wonder if they have the old character records and would be able/willing to restore them as a reward for those of us who supported the game early on? William -- Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
I use a NeXT Cube as my main machine, and've been investigating this somewhat.
The NeXT user experience goes beyond mere aesthetics to an overall synergy between the Dock, Browser, windowing system, drag and drop protocols and Services/multiple pasteboards which has to be experienced to be believed. Moreover, there's a consistency between NeXT apps which doesn't exist on any other platform, save perhaps PenPoint or the Newton.
Here are the links which I've put together covering both appearance and an attempt at the interface: GTKStep http://www-info2.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/mit arbeiter/ulli/gtkstep/
NEdit http://www-pat.fnal.gov/nirvana/nedit.html
neXTaw http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~kojima/nextaw/index.htm l
WindowMaker http://www.windowmaker.org
Postilion http://www.postilion.org
GNUstep http://www.gnustep.org
TkStep http://www.fga.de/~ograf/TkStep.shtml
I'll end by simply noting that NeXT's icons seem the most frequently illicitly pirated of any OS and that if you think the look of the OS is nice, one should try the feel of it sometime. I doubt that Mac OS X is going to live up to it---too much being left out (like built-in PostScript faxing), but we'll see.
William
Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
Hopefully this will progress well, I want a replacement for my NCR-3125 (running PenPoint) and my Newton. MP-100. I've considered the Vadem Clio/Sharp Tri-Pad, but the software isn't adequate to my desire (and no, neither is the Newton, nor was the NCR, though the NCR was close when I had Windows for Pen and FutureWave's SmartSketch).
Linux and Gill, GYVE or Killustrator would be perfect for my needs (especially with a port of TeX thrown in)
William
-- Lettering Art in Modern Use
Re:What i'd really like to see....
on
Gimp 1.2 Preview
·
· Score: 1
Well, one needs to have a color separation table which maps the RGB input to CMYK output, plus one needs to ``screen'' the image which is to say convert it from transparent blocks of light (pixels) to opaque-semi-transparent dots/areas of ink. This conversion must also include information on how to handle colrs which can be shown in RGB, but are ``out of gamut'', which is to say, not printable with four-color process printing.
Screening isn't the biggest block, since that's typically done by a PostScript RIP, but the conversion into CMYK is.
William
Re:What i'd really like to see....
on
Gimp 1.2 Preview
·
· Score: 2
Color separation tables are expensive to create and require a fingerprint of the press in question as well as an understanding of colorspace and theory.
Here're some basic books on the subject: Blatner, David and Steve Roth. Real World Scanning and Halftones (Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 1993). ISBN 1-56609-093-8, second edition 0201696835.
Nyman, Matties. Four Colors/One Image: Getting Great Color Output with Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and Cachet (Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 1993). ISBN 1-56609-083-0.
Tapscott, Diane and Lisa Jeans, Pat Soberanis, Rita Amladi and Jim Ryan. Professional Studio Techniques: Production Essentials (Mountain View, California: Adobe Press, 1994). ISBN 1-56830-124-3
I've links to Amazon to purchase these books on my web page at: http://members.aol.com/willadams/color.htm (obligatory disclaimer, I'll make money if anyone does purchase through said links)
My company spends ~$100,000 a year creating test plates for our customers to fingerprint their presses for color matching purposes. Like I said, it's expensive.
There were a couple of companies which did silent systems with special, balanced fans and thermostats and insulation to run quieter, but I don't think any of them are around any longer.
Best solution is to just put the system unit in a closet and run a series of extension cords for the monitor, etc.
The point is it's a real OS, unlike the Mac OS. Even 8.6 crashes pathetically regularly.
Moreover, the Mac UI hasn't grown up much since 1984 and is still oriented towards single application use on a single monitor with no way to move an application widgets in their entirety to a specific area of the screen. There was a quote from Jobs on this in the Sept. 1995 Byte, "The Macintosh has been dead in the water since 1985 in terms of its user interface."
NeXT/OPENstep does much better in this regard, and I really hope that this group follows their UI cues and improves upon them.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried very hard to replace the Mac OS with a PPC Linux, but encountered some huge stumbling blocks, to wit:
.pdf placed properly on a lett-sized sheet, couldn't get it to fit-to-page either---is Adobe Acrobat ever going to have a .ppc Linux binary?
- generic SCSI - doesn't work on G4s, so no Scanner
- smbfs - hard to find as a pre-compiled module, so no access to the NT Server directly
- no Appletalk client protocol AFAICT - so no accessing NT Appletask shares, or the other Macs directly
- Mac emulation limited - Mac on linux, www.maconlinux.org is still too slow for my purposes, while Executor www.ardi.com isn't out of beta yet for the PowerPC version.
- vector drawing quite primitive - Killustrator core dumped in just a few minutes of experimentation, while Sketch was a huge problem to install and once working had a not very efficient/elegant drawing UI (in comparison to, say FreeHand/Virtuoso, where with the pen tool selected, one can draw, move points (even as they're being placed), edit, etc. just by different modifier keys)
- pdf handling was kind of primitive, especially for printing, couldn't get the top part of a legal-sized
In the positive vein:
- it was nice to have a free TeX implementation
- LyX is awesome www.lyx.org
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, there was HP's NewWave, which was so disassociated from the filesystem it required special tools to copy to a floppy or other media---it is one of the four best UIs I've ever used though (the other three were/are PenPoint, Newton and NeXT/OPENstep).
Not bad for a shell on top of Windows.
It's unfortunate that Bill Gates found it so threatening.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
``Can you imagine C after it "borrows" a few verbs (function calls) from say smalltalk?''
Uh, have you ever heard of Objective-C?
FWIW, this sort of discussion is pretty standard in the linguistics community, Chomsky, et. al.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Frater said:
``It's my experience that the current MacOS provides support for copy and paste of 'styled text', which includes font information. Is that what you're talking about?''
No, that's not what he's talking about.
I just had this discussion on CSMA, to re-cap, NeXTstep provides multiple pasteboards, one of these is controlled by 3 and 4, the former copies font _formatting_, the latter pastes said formatting onto the selected text, but doesn't otherwise change the text---very handy, with no equivalent in Mac OS per se, though character styles in apps pretty much obviates the need for it in those apps which support character styles.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Well, I've been using PPC Linux off and on for a while now, and do have the following benchmark (a largish TeX document provided by Christopher Eyrich)
>My results on a G4/400MHz ``Yikes!'' B&W G3 type motherboard
>machine with a 10MB ATA HD using YellowDogLinux CS 1.1
>real 7.669s
>user 6.220s
>sys 0.300s
Here're some numbers for comparison:
>- Celeron 333, RedHat 5.2 (calis, Herbert) 7.6
>- Celeron 450 (overclocked Celeron-300A), 100MHz, PC100 SDRAM 5.5
>- AMD K6-3 450, 512K L3-Cach, 100MHz-Bus, Redhat 6.1 (expi) 4.7
Basically, the G4 was 10% or so faster than the similar speed x86 chips---and this with a (relatively) unoptimized kernel on the slowest motherboard (Yikes!==b/w G3)
Not sure how many people're using TeX, but it's a real world benchmark I happened to still have in my mail box....
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Actually, this sort of thing goes a bit further back than even GRiD Corporation (My first laptop was a GRiDCase III plus).
First, there was Go Corporation, and PenPoint (now owned by the MITI of Taiwan), and wonderful NCR-2125 and other systems, as well as the ill-fated Momenta (made the cover of Byte Magazine).
IBM's ThinkPad was originally to be a pen slate, and did eventually ship as one (the 730T), while they also had a convertible (the 360P), much like the GriD Convertible (later sold as the AST Executive when AST bought GRiD, but then they were bought by Tandy....)
What I really hope for is a system like to the Mitsubishy Amity VP/SP with a docking station which uses the pen slate unit as a display, but has a separate keyboard which can be mounted to the display/slate for travelling like the Compaq Concerto.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Cubes were made out of magnesium---they even had an article in NeXTWorld showing them burning a Cube at JPL or some such place.
William
Oops, GNUstep should've been at the end of that post.
<BR>
<BR>
William
Drat. Wish they'd chosen to give away the source to the Lighthouse Design suite of NeXT/OPENstep apps instead, much nicer and would've been a huge boost to
William
Why not just use Darwin?
I finally managed to get it d/l'd, it installed easily enough, now I just need to setup CVS accesss through our Proxy here at work and hopefully I'll be all set.
Wiliam
It's not all that expensive switching to another platform, particularly not to Windows, since one can merely up-grade one's Mac apps at the next version to Windows ones (or vice versa). For fonts, one need merely purchase a ``sidegrade'' from the font vendor---Adobe is particularly nice about this.
For my part, a couple of years ago I got sick of Windows and the Mac OS and managed to get a NeXT Cube and still use it as my primary workstation, and far prefer it to the G4 or Pentium III at work.
I hope Mac OS X will live up to the legacy of OPENSTEP, but it still looks like NeXT users will have to give up a lot of things I value highly:
Movable main menu
Tear off menus
scroll bars on the left
top-level print, hide and quit menus
rich set of clients for services (how long/how much will it cost to put together an equivalent to Webster.app, Oxford's, Digital Shakespeare and Hacker.app?)
Window controls which are always identifiable
icons at the top of browser columns
a shelf
William
To quote from John Warnock's Preface to ``The Purple Book'' _Programming the Display PostScript System with NeXTstep_,
"Adobe(R) and NeXTTM began joint development on PostScript software for displays---the Display PostScript(R) system---in 1985, soon after NeXT Computer, Inc. was founded.... The Display PostScript system was originally developed for the NeXT platform because Adobe and NeXT share a similar vision of the future of computing. Both see the advantage of having the same imaging model drive the display and the printer...."
<BR>
<BR>
That's scarcely ``paying Adobe to develop DPS'' Also, DPS is available for X Window on Solaris, and is used in Xy Corporations XyVision products.<BR>
<BR>
Similarly, Quartz was developed entirely in-house by Apple---having had the rug pulled out from under them once with Adobe's renegging on their agreement for a free DPS license for the Yellow Box for Windows run-time, they could scarcely allow for the possibility of such an occurence again, no?
<BR>
<BR>
William
Actually, one of the nicest of TeX implementations was done for NeXTstep, TeXView.app (provided as an example in /NextDeveloper/Demos in NeXTstep) along with InstantTeX (originally by Dmitri Linde, later expanded upon by various individuals).
.pdf implementation is that it takes away ones ability to effortlessly extend (for example) a drawing application with (arbitrary) PostScript code and have said code render on-screen.
.pdfs for the unwashed masses. LyX, www.lyx.org looks very promishing for this sort of thing as well---though I hope someone 'stepifies the app---I want my vertical menus! support for services! etc.
Alan Hoenig, author of _TeX Unbound_ speaks highly of NeXTstep and the power of Display PostScript in his book and in articles in TugBoat (newsletter of the TeX User's Group, www.tug.org)
The problem with the
Hopefully, InstantTeX or some successor to it and TeXView will be available for GNUstep and will then make it trivial to provide
William
Another UI which did drag-and-drop quite well was HP's NewWave....wonder where the code for it wound up?
NeXTstep though, is the best UI I've yet encountered, and pleasantly, is also being re-created www.gnustep.org.
William
Automated font installation for TeX would be really nice. However, that's a tough nut to crack---what sort of virtual font are you going to make? is the italic a genuine one? is the italic angle reported correctly? etc.
Similarly, the CMYK color thing is a tough one---who's going to finance the creation of the color tables? Color space work and look up tables are expensive, especially if one really wants it to work with any verisimilitude.
William
At a guess, this would be NeXT/OPENstep. www.next.com aliases to Apple's Enterprise software site. If one can score an old machine or copy of the OS, Apple is giving out free updates to NeXTstep 3.3 or OPENSTEP 4.2. William
I'd suggest two different words, ``Literate Programming''.
Dr. Knuth's work on this is wonderful, and if concepts like it had been more prevalent in the computer science course I took, I'd'be likely managed to've gotten a second major in CS in addition to my degree in art/graphic design.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
I played NWN on AOL as well, and really enjoyed it (to the tune of ~100 hours per month at the rate of $4/hr., plus long distance charges). I was very dissappointed when the game was closed down and am glad to see it revived so---hopefully they'll balance playability, character advancement, etc. I wonder if they have the old character records and would be able/willing to restore them as a reward for those of us who supported the game early on? William -- Lettering Art in Modern Use http://members.aol.com/willadams
I use a NeXT Cube as my main machine, and've been investigating this somewhat.
t arbeiter/ulli/gtkstep/
m l
The NeXT user experience goes beyond mere aesthetics to an overall synergy between the Dock, Browser, windowing system, drag and drop protocols and Services/multiple pasteboards which has to be experienced to be believed. Moreover, there's a consistency between NeXT apps which doesn't exist on any other platform, save perhaps PenPoint or the Newton.
Here are the links which I've put together covering both appearance and an attempt at the interface:
GTKStep
http://www-info2.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/mi
NEdit
http://www-pat.fnal.gov/nirvana/nedit.html
neXTaw
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~kojima/nextaw/index.ht
WindowMaker
http://www.windowmaker.org
Postilion
http://www.postilion.org
GNUstep
http://www.gnustep.org
TkStep
http://www.fga.de/~ograf/TkStep.shtml
I'll end by simply noting that NeXT's icons seem the most frequently illicitly pirated of any OS and that if you think the look of the OS is nice, one should try the feel of it sometime. I doubt that Mac OS X is going to live up to it---too much being left out (like built-in PostScript faxing), but we'll see.
William
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Hmm, interesting.
Hopefully this will progress well, I want a replacement for my NCR-3125 (running PenPoint) and my Newton. MP-100. I've considered the Vadem Clio/Sharp Tri-Pad, but the software isn't adequate to my desire (and no, neither is the Newton, nor was the NCR, though the NCR was close when I had Windows for Pen and FutureWave's SmartSketch).
Linux and Gill, GYVE or Killustrator would be perfect for my needs (especially with a port of TeX thrown in)
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Well, one needs to have a color separation table which maps the RGB input to CMYK output, plus one needs to ``screen'' the image which is to say convert it from transparent blocks of light (pixels) to opaque-semi-transparent dots/areas of ink. This conversion must also include information on how to handle colrs which can be shown in RGB, but are ``out of gamut'', which is to say, not printable with four-color process printing.
Screening isn't the biggest block, since that's typically done by a PostScript RIP, but the conversion into CMYK is.
William
Color separation tables are expensive to create and require a fingerprint of the press in question as well as an understanding of colorspace and theory.
Here're some basic books on the subject:
Blatner, David and Steve Roth. Real World Scanning and Halftones (Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 1993). ISBN 1-56609-093-8, second edition 0201696835.
Nyman, Matties. Four Colors/One Image: Getting Great Color Output with Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and Cachet (Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 1993). ISBN 1-56609-083-0.
Tapscott, Diane and Lisa Jeans, Pat Soberanis, Rita Amladi and Jim Ryan. Professional Studio Techniques: Production Essentials (Mountain View, California: Adobe Press, 1994). ISBN 1-56830-124-3
I've links to Amazon to purchase these books on my web page at: http://members.aol.com/willadams/color.htm
(obligatory disclaimer, I'll make money if anyone does purchase through said links)
My company spends ~$100,000 a year creating test plates for our customers to fingerprint their presses for color matching purposes. Like I said, it's expensive.
William
There were a couple of companies which did silent systems with special, balanced fans and thermostats and insulation to run quieter, but I don't think any of them are around any longer.
Best solution is to just put the system unit in a closet and run a series of extension cords for the monitor, etc.
William
The NeXT/OPENstep UI is much more than merely the Dock.
This has been discussed at length in comp.sys.next.advocacy and I'd urge you to read there (try ) and to try out a NeXT machine.
William
The point is it's a real OS, unlike the Mac OS. Even 8.6 crashes pathetically regularly.
Moreover, the Mac UI hasn't grown up much since 1984 and is still oriented towards single application use on a single monitor with no way to move an application widgets in their entirety to a specific area of the screen. There was a quote from Jobs on this in the Sept. 1995 Byte, "The Macintosh has been dead in the water since 1985 in terms of its user interface."
NeXT/OPENstep does much better in this regard, and I really hope that this group follows their UI cues and improves upon them.
William
http://members.aol.com/willadams