18 May
2016
18 May
'16
1:42 p.m.
On 2016-05-18 3:40 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
That is true of some modules, like QuickDraw on the Mac. It is certainly
not true generally.
--Toby
> 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.