January 93 - WAMADA News
WAMADA News
John MacVeigh
The October WAMADA meeting was host to Jon Grover of Apple Computer, who
introduced us to the latest Macintosh products. Most of you have by now already seen
the new machines (if not actually purchased them!) so I will forego a listing of the
technical details. But this meeting did present the chance to consider how trends in
hardware affect the direction of software development.
Just as we developers are maximizing the amount of memory in our Quadras,
switching to 16" or 19" full-color monitors and ordering new hard disks, the good
folks who buy our software have decided they want to carry their entire computer
system in one hand. Silly people! Don't they realize that color is now de rigueur ? That
16MB of RAM and 240MB of disk space is the norm?
This is not to say that the PowerBooks are under-powered. My first glimpse of the
preternaturally thin Duo was with it propped open in a lap, running Photoshop™. On
the other hand, these machines are battery-powered. Without the deus ex machina of
cold-fusion, short-lived batteries will be the Achilles heel of portable machines for
quite awhile. This is a problem for programs which rely heavily on disk access.
Multi-segment MacApp programs come to mind at this point. As do programs which
rely on multiple shared libraries managed by the Shared Library Manager. And, in the
extreme case, a system based entirely on shared persistent objects would seem to
require constant disk access, or enormous static memory banks. What's a programmer
to do?
Rely on hardware, I guess. Yes, I know, heresy coming from a programmer. But face
it, the 68882 in an fx outperforms the software emulation on a 68040. And running
the circuitry at 3.3 volts instead of 5 volts can save more power than any carefully
planned code segmentation strategy. The good news here is that Apple's control of their
own hardware gives them the ability to solve some of these problems. The CPU chosen
for the Newton is such an example. The November issue of Byte contains an article
discussing the ARM610 chip, which contains an Apple designed (and patented) Memory
Management Unit. The MMU is particularly suited to managing a persistent object
store and allowing background garbage collection. While these features may not appear
on Macintoshes in the near future, it's nice to know that someone's given some thought
to how hardware can directly assist the programmer.
Well, I've run out of things to italicize, so I'll bring this note to a close. If you're in
the D.C. area, and interested in object oriented programming, give us a visit. WAMADA
meets every third Wednesday at McDonnell Douglas in Tyson's Corner, Virginia,
beginning around 7:15 p.m. For a map, send a message to JEFFRIES.L on AppleLink, or
call Leslie at (301) 340-5126 during business hours (EST).