18 May
2016
18 May
'16
12:40 p.m.
> At the time, it was sometimes interpreted
differently: "Apple hired
> brilliant people for the project. BUT, they had so little real-world
> experience that they didn't even realize what a mistake it would be to
> write an OS in a high level language.
On Wed, 18 May 2016, Paul Koning wrote:
What a bizarre statement, given that there was plenty
of precedent for
doing so very successfully.
It might be a valid statement if made much more nuanced, say by talking
about the slowness of the processors, or the inefficiency of the
particular compilers used. But clearly there had been successful (large
scale) operating systems written in high level languages well before the
Mac.
[actually Lisa was the issue]
I think that there was a general perception that microprocessors were not
fast enough to function properly without hand-optimized assembly language.
In those days, even games did not need "time-delay loops".
But, "Moore's Law" held that it wouldn't be much longer.
Just one doubling of the speed of the Lisa's hardware would have been
enough to silence the speed complaints.