strangest systems I've sent email from

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-05-18 3:40 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
>>> 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.

That is true of some modules, like QuickDraw on the Mac. It is certainly 
not true generally.

--Toby

> 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.
>
>