Essays on the near future by software wizards Dan Allen, Frank Alviani, Elon Gasper, Ted Johnson, Scott Knaster and Leonard Rosenthal. The Macintosh is now a mature product. As of January 1989 Macintosh is five years old. It has come a long way: from 128 KB of RAM to 8 MB, from 400 KB floppies to 1.2 MB, from no hard disk to gigabytes if needed, and from two applications (good old MacWrite and MacPaint) to thousands. The average Macintosh…
by Jim Salmons and Timlynn BabitskyJFS ConsultingMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 52 The Gunakara Sun Systems Limited of Halifax, Nova Scotia, has released a new programming language and development environment that brings together three distinctly different and powerful computer science methodologies — object-oriented, dataflow and visual programming. No one of these is overwhelming by itself, but by combining them Prograph provides a programming environment and a new language that will change the way you think about and write programs. We…
By Howard KatzMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 28 During my last year of high school, I was initiated into the mysteries of male bonding and five-card stud by a older bachelor who resided on the second floor of the apartment building where I lived. I was seventeen, and for the most part, yes, it was a very good year. The fellow was a cab driver, and way back then the word “hack” had only one meaning. I still think fondly…
By Rick ThomasMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 18 A key word in Apple’s vision for software development is “multi-tasking”. In the future, applications simply will not work with new versions of the Mac OS unless they are designed from the beginning to work cooperatively in a multi-application environment. Rumor has it that beginning with System 8.0 (due to arrive sometime in 1990), the Mac will no longer support DA’s. It’ll be “MultiFinder or Bust!” for Macintosh developers. In this article,…
By Charles T. LukaszewskiSun Remarketing, Inc.MacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 — Page 54 Apple’s Lisa computer never had a chance. Its windows and mice were ahead of their time. A nice sports car cost less than a minimally-configured Lisa system. And the most significant obstacle, which shaped Lisa’s decline and recent return, was that Steve Jobs didn’t want it, and for a very good reason. Jobs’ pet project, code-named Macintosh, was introduced one year after the Lisa at one-third the price. But…
By Randy LeonardMac Tech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 22 Object-oriented programming languages date back to the late 1960’s with the development of the language Simula-67 by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl of the Norwegian Computing Center. More recent object-oriented languages include SmallTalk-80, C++ and Object Pascal. However, until only recently these languages have received little or no consideration as suitable languages for application development on widely used and popular computers. This trend, however, is quickly changing. Recently, NeXT, Inc. announced…
By Dan ShaferMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 — Page 50 In the past several weeks, I have become aware of several meta-language extensions to HyperTalk that seem to suggest some interesting ways in which Our Favorite Language might be used in the future. I developed one of them for use in a specific project, another came to my attention on CompuServe and a third was sent to me by a reader of my book HyperTalk Programming to show me what could be…
by Craig RaglandMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 — Page 32 Hypermedia is a new form of software that blends information of different forms with high levels of user control. Unlike most software, the production of hypermedia is limited less by technical expertise or programming skills and more by access to data and design abilities. This offers significant opportunities to developers of widely different levels of sophistication. The technically naive can focus on assembly of information, while advanced programmers can extend available delivery…
by Anna O’Connell, P.E.MacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 10 “Artificial intelligence,” depending on how you look at it, is a set of useful tools for building smarter, more powerful applications, or a philosophical concept that threatens humanity, or simply an oxymoron. In this article, Anna O’Connell examines the plethora of AI languages and development platforms that have been introduced for the Macintosh in the past two years, and discusses how AI techniques can be employed to build more intuitive, easier-to-use…
By Andrew Himes, EditorMac Tech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 9 Things didn’t used to be this way. It used to be you could sit on the front porch in the hot summer sun, sip an ice tea with a mint leaf and a lemon slice in it, and watch the process of technological change as it flowed slowly past your house. Nothing happened too fast. If something was true in your grandmother’s day, it was probably true in your day,…
This article describes a program which lets you easily install customizing routines, such as a RAMdisk and clock card drivers, on bootup into ProDOS, It mimics, under ProDOS 8, the SYSTEM.SETUP feature of ProDOS 16. It is emphatically placed in the public domain: I urge software publishers to take it and include it where appropriate with their own programs. I only ask that you take the program unmodified. It would be unfortunate if variants of the program spread around, each…
How many of you remember Little Brickout? If you do, you may be dating yourself, because it goes back almost ten years. A Lo-Res [gasp] graphics game played with the game paddles, Brickout’s simple object was to knock bricks out of a wall with a bouncing ball. How far things have come since then! Once upon a time, personal computers were thought of as little more than sophisticated toys, good only for playing games. Little did we know or foresee,…
By Lynne RyderAustralian Apple Review Vol 4 No 3 PP32-33 Another topic which often causes difficulty for students, yet lends itself elegantly to the computer, is number bases. I am including two short programs – the first written by one of my students, Sandi Steeple which generates numbers for bases less than 10, while the second comes from an old, but still very useful book, ‘Fifty Basic Exercises’ by Jean-Pierre Lamoiter (published by Sybex) and generates numbers for bases greater…
Australian Apple Review – June 1987 The caption on the box of this delightful program declares “for people of all ages’ and if the widely varying age-groups attending Sydney’s annual Teddy Bear’s Picnic in Wentworth Park are anything to go by, it’s probably true. Everyone seems to have had a Teddy Bear at one time or another and if they’ve now graduated to micro-computers they could combine the two things and play with both toys at once. Either that or…
Australian Apple Review June 1987 Designed for the Apple IIGSby Gareth Powell THE flow of programs for the Apple II GS is slow but certain. The software houses realise that this machine has its own very special following and that an integration of games, graphics and business programs is what is needed. There have very possibly been other databases made available for the Apple IIGS, but Notes’n’ Files (note the appalling American spelling) is the first one to come our…
for the Apple II seriesby Eric HolroydAustralian Apple Review June 1987 A very useful enhancement program for owners of the Print Shop, the Graphics Expander comes complete with over 300 graphics on the disk, all of which can be used just as they are or modified to suit your requirements with the easy- to-use editing tools within the program. Owners of the Newsroom will be already familiar with these tools as the Graphics Expander also comes from Springboard Software in…
Australian Apple Review June 1987 Verbatim are well-known for their disks, especially for Datalife, but not many people know they produce good software as well. The Disk Drive Analyzer is a very high quality program written to check the performance of your disk drive. It runs on all Apple 11 series and Apple /// disk drives, and all Apple compatible drives. (It requires 48K RAM, but nowadays, who’s interested in how many “K”s it requires?) All you have to do…
Australian Apple Review – June 1987Deluxe Editionby Eric Holroyd This program was originally released in 1986 and has now been re-released with the ‘Deluxe’ tag. The new version has several enhancements over it’s predecessor including improved printer drivers and the very handy option to return to the previous screen you worked on by pressing CRTUC. The program itself has a lot in common with Teddy Bear-rels of Fun. It’s from the same company and is very similar in operation. If…
Australian Apple Review June 1987 Chemistry concepts and theories are not the easiest to grasp for the average student and chemistry as it is taught in our schools today seems to be either loved (mainly because the student finds the chemical principles logical and simple to understand) or hated (for those students who see no rhyme or reason behind the concepts) by those who try to master it. Laboratory experiments are what provides the cornerstone on which all our chemical…
