Rhapsody in beige

June 20, 1997

Boing.

That's the sound of the entire computer industry bouncing off the walls these days over a little thing called Java. The Java-as-language and Java-as-operating-system war I described a couple columns back has finally become an open shooting war: Microsoft has announced a new Java for Windows.

As Dave Winer says, "checkmate."

Sun knew better than to play this the way they did. They attacked Microsoft on the only two playing fields Microsoft knows well - programming languages and Windows. Remember the first product released by Micro-Soft in 1975 was BASIC for the Altair - remember before Windows, Microsoft tried to rule the world by writing BASIC interpreters and C and COBOL compilers for every platform under the sun. Microsoft knows from programming languages - and as with all things Microsoft surveys, Java is useful componentry.

Java as an OS is a non-entity, says Microsoft, because it has a nearly nonexistent toolbox and Windows already runs on 90% of the computers in the world. Which leaves Java as a programming language, which if you're used to C/C++, is a damn good little language. (I, of course, am NOT used to C and C++, and haven't thus been so far impressed with Java as a language - but then, I grew up on good old-fashioned GOTO-laden line-number Disk Extended Color BASIC, copyright 1982 by Tandy under license from Microsoft.)

Microsoft has basically said "Java is a neat language, and now that the buzzword has made the rounds and programmers have been working with it awhile, and its cross-platformity has shown to be less of a panacea than Sun promised, here's a toolkit to let you write native Windows apps with it."

Sun's gonna scream, of course - but that's what Sun does. Like Netscape, Sun doesn't politely stand up and utter "But, kind sir, I must object" in a stately British accent - they scream "What the fuck!" at the top of their lungs.

So where does this leave the industry? Well, for one thing, Apple, the last major-label non-Intel player, has never been an active participant in the whole Java thing from day one. The Macintosh is the last "major" platform to receive a Java product - the original Sun Java Developers Kit was in its 1.0 release on Windows and every UNIX on the face of the earth six months before a Mac version went into beta. Same with Netscape Navigator - version 2.0 for Windows had Java, but it wasn't until version 3.0 (and the accompanying 12MB memory footprint) that Java found its way to Navigator on the Mac. And it was sloooow. And crash-prone, too - I've learned to turn Java off when I browse the Web, all it takes is one page with a pointless Java ticker and it's Type 11.

Despite the Mac's third-rate treatment from Sun, a company that once wanted to buy Apple, Apple remains committed to Java - and for the life of me I can't grasp why. There are better cross-platform write-once-compile-anywhere toolkits than Java - Python, for example. There are interpreted languages that blow Java away in speed because you emulate groups of instructions, instead of bytecode by bytecode - when BASIC says "window(0,0)-(320,200)" you just issue the native toolbox call and away you go. Fer cryin out loud, even X Window is cross-platform - you can run it on a central server and export its GUI across a network to any machine with an X client, which means your applications don't have to even be compiled for the machine you're running on. Systems like Timbuktu and PCAnywhere and Citrix WinFrame accomplish similar "cross-platform" functionality natively for the Mac and Windows.

But yet Ellen Hancock made that bizarre remark about having considered writing the Mac OS in Java. That betrays a certain hazy conception of how Java works and what it is - you can of course write an OS in any language you want, the Mac OS was originally written in Pascal and AmigaDOS was originally written in BCPL. But Java is essentially an enhanced C++, and the general public doesn't care what your source code looks like - which means she must have meant Java as a platform. Thus saying you considered writing an OS in Java is like saying you're gonna park the garage in the house, or you're gonna write the typewriter in your word processor. It's not quite redundant, but yet there's still something not right about the logic of the thing.

Ellen doesn't give up. Parts of Rhapsody are already being written in Java - and I have no clue why.

I have seen an early screenshot of Rhapsody - you can find it at CNet, and no, I haven't gotten the streaming-video plug in working, so I haven't seen their little presentation. Rhapsody is an almost surreal-looking OS. It's Macintosh - or at least Copland - in appearance, with the now-overhyped Platinum (aka Apple Grayscale, aka Copland, aka Aaron) look. Menubar across the top. But then you get past the initial "oh, it's just another Mac OS 8 screenshot" and you start noticing little things that aren't Mac.

The scrollbars are proportional. They have both arrows clustered at one end - the end nearest the sizing corner. Amiga users will feel right at home here - that arrangement is very familiar. NeXTSTEP allowed you to configure whether the scrollbars appeared on the left or right, above or below the window - and which corner the arrows appeared in - so there's a chance Rhapsody will allow that as well. The NeXT heritage is also readily apparent in a Dock across the bottom of the screenshot - and yes - the old NeXT emblem at the "head" of the Dock has been replaced by a 24-bit color Apple logo. The Recycler is intact. There is a desktop layer just like a Mac where you can throw icons - so you can use the Dock but you don't HAVE to use the Dock. And it's all preemptive multitasking.

Maybe this will be a good sign after all. There's something to be said for ripping an OS apart and overhauling it instead of just patching it for decades on end - perhaps a "recompiled" Mac OS with a Mach/UNIX engine will be cool after all. All this niftiness doesn't come without its flaws, though - existing Mac applications have to run inside the Blue Box, which is basically a fancy name for something like Shapeshifter. It's a complete Macintosh running in a window - so the first Rhapsody Unified Release will actually have two Finders, one for Rhapsody and one for the emulated Mac running in the box. Drag-and-drop doesn't work from Blue Box to Yellow Box (the native Rhapsody side) - and even shared clipboards are gonna be a challenge, because the moment you "unprotect" part of the Mac OS to allow it to safely exchange data with Rhapsody, it's a hole through which a crashing OS can squeeze. Shared clipboards are possible - Shapeshifter does this nicely. Shared filesystems - when Rhapsody works on Berkeley FFS and the Mac works on Apple HFS - are another issue entirely - another reason for dual Finders, you actually have two file systems.

But it's a good bet much of the crap will get fixed before long - Apple just wants to get Rhapsody OUT THE DOOR as soon as possible, and bug-free. It'll probably resolve the split-personality issues afterward - if indeed such differences SHOULD be resolved for human-interface issues. Emulation of other OSes is a tricky thing - applications that work different, say style guideline writers, should look different. Mac OS stuff running in its own window certainly provides a visual separator that says "abandon all hope ye who enter" - once inside the Blue Box (no word on whether the window will actually have a blue border, though it's safe to say a hack will appear for that) the rules change slightly. Applications can crash - and take each other down, or even the whole Blue Box. Things take forever. Icons in the Blue Box stay in the Blue Box - and escape only via the Clipboard or shared disk filesystems. In a way Shapeshifter already has this down to a T - there's no way you could visually mistake the two environments on the same machine, and you know going in that the data on the Mac side won't be 100% transparently accessible to the Amiga side and vice versa. You expect it because once the Happy Mac appears in an Amiga window, it's visually clear the rules inside that box are different. Not to say that an advanced Shapeshifter or Rhapsody might not actually emulate the Mac Toolbox itself and reroute GUI calls to the "real" OS underneath - but it hasn't happened, and remains to be seen whether it COULD happen.

The Amiga side of things has been relatively quiet lately. I must confess I haven't been keeping up with the ICOA happenings - presumably nobody's brought automatic weapons into it yet, so things there must be cool. I DO know Gateway has mentioned that "the idea of an open Amiga" fascinates them - which may mean they're talking about ICOA and the Open Amiga initiative. I try to keep my eyes peeled - between work and being miserable - but haven't seen much yet.

Well, there is ONE rumor I should mention - except I'm not entirely sure I should. Oh hell, I'll tell you as much as I can - it's a new hardware product in the works, has a PCMCIA edge at one end and an HDB15 connector at the other. Use your imagination to what's in between - and if anyone asks, I told you nothing.

Insanity is the true mother of invention - necessity be damned. I'm going to build my own A1200 case. Of what? I haven't decided. Polymer clay, possibly. Popsicle sticks. Sheet metal. I don't know. All I know is, that A1200 case is a mess - too much hardware and not enough ventilation. I have no problem with leaving the keyboard attached to the case - the resulting system might end up looking like a Commodore PET or a Tandy 1000 HX or a Bodega Bay but I don't really care. I need drive bays, I need a place to stick a power supply, and I need a place to stick a fan. I'm not above carving it out of wood - except an internal power supply might catch it on fire. I'm not above using heavy-duty plaster with wire reinforcements - though such a case would probably weigh as much as I do. I'm not above using Play-Doh - that stuff dries hard - but the resulting case would look exactly like what it is, a computer case made of Play-Doh. I'm not above making the case out of Legos - though I'm actually not sure Lego pieces are made in the sizes and shapes I'd need to go around the keyboard. Would be exceedingly cool, though, to have a computer case with a Lego top - while waiting on a render you could build houses and spaceports on the top of the case. Perhaps a combo, then - a plastic or wood or metal keyboard platen with a surrounding Lego case, securely glued together underneath. All in black.

Ooooh. That's a nifty idea.

I'm currently experiencing the weirdest kind of writer's block I've ever encountered. It's an eerie thing - I try to write fiction and can't because it depresses me. It seems so weird that I could actually have experienced enough in my life that fantasy no longer works on me - that for any event or person or place I could conjure, I've actually experienced something better or worse or stranger. To think that I'm simply nostalgic for good times I've had in the past, well, that depresses me because I can't go to those places or experience those good times again. To think my imagination is so limited I can no longer beat reality with it - is also depressing. In a way it's cool - finally proof the world doesn't suck - but that I'm actually imprisoned underneath it, doesn't help. I suppose it'll go away eventually - but it's so weird, that writing fiction, what I used to do to escape depression, is now a major cause of it.

I gave the Conner back to the guy - and am keeping a fan pointed at the hard drive. I'm shopping for hard drives now - or more precisely, shopping for cheap removable media to use with the used 240MB drive I'm buying for $25 soon. The idea is, that SCSI+ cannot boot - so I must have an IDE boot drive of some kind. I have several options there - the 240MB is available and is Seagate, though I could also pick up a used 80MB 2.5-inch drive for $50 out of many Amiga dealers, which would be fine for a boot drive and would actually be something close to "stock configuration" (like I'm worried about that now, having turned that Amiga into a fire-breathing monster cyborg with two power supplies). Then I'd just stick something like a Zip or Jaz on the SCSI port and live off cartridges that actually run faster than what the SCSI+ is probably capable of pushing.

Zip drives are about $150 these days, cartridges about $15 for 100MB, and have become an unofficial standard - the alternative would be Syquest, the drives and cartridges cost twice as much and hold twice as much - or one of the off-brand drives like Nomai or Olympus. Or I could get insane and go magneto-optical - not. Those 120MB "floppies" you find in new Compaqs might turn out to be a standard or they might not. Disk drives aren't like computers, because the natural tendency is to fill up more disks, if a removable media drive goes out of production and the supply of media dries up, you're SOL. Ask Coleco Adam owners what they had to do once the old Data Packs ran out. (The procedure involved drilling.) Ask Rainbow owners how far backwards they have to bend to find hard-sector 5.25-inch floppies. Any old TRS-80 with a tape drive can still find blank tapes - and any old IBM PC XT can still find 5.25-inch floppies, if they look hard enough. But you with AMDEK 3-inch "shell floppies" or "wafer" tapes or the like, are hurting. This is the danger in the removable media war - the only true obsolescence is when a device ceases to be useful, and a drive for which you can't get media isn't particularly useful.

But anyway. What am I rambling about? ALL computers are useful - if you're using them for something you know how to make them do. I went to a friend's house once to help "activate" two old computers she had - a Tandy 1000 SX with hard drive, and a C128 with a floppy drive. When I left, the C128 - a computer I had actually never before seen in person except on store shelves - was up and running with a word processor, and the Tandy 1000 was still DOA - because the C128 came with documentation. The SX is closer to what is now considered "industry standard" - but the C128 kicks its ass in benchmarks, ease of use, and applications support. I'll wager you'll find more software today for the C128 than you will for an 8MHz 8088-based MS-DOS machine. The Tandy will probably become useful someday - if someone figures out how to make the hard drive work - but it won't be useful for much more than simple word processing, the CPU is just too slow. Always has been - the C128 would have kicked its ass in 1987 just the same as it does today.

This is a critical lesson we still forget - we think once something is "better" than what we have, what we have must automatically be "broken." News for ya: all computers are broken. No one has made a perfect computer - not even God, the human brain generates segmentation faults occasionally, has suboptimal pattern recognition under some circumstances, and its floating-point unit is either slow or imprecise or both. All computers are broken, and if you only notice the flaws after something better comes out, you'll just repeat the mistake with the next cool thing in three years. Sidestep what a machine does wrong and exploit what it does right - put Quake and POV-Ray on the PC, Photoshop and BBEdit on the Mac, Imagine and ImageFX and ACE and whatever other killer apps you may have on the Amiga, Max-10 and OS/9 on a Color Computer, Tekken on the Playstation, and live happy. To each according to its need, from each according to its ability - they're computers, fer cryin out loud, be communist and totalitarian with them! It's what they're there for. Technology is in our service - not vice versa. If it won't do what you want, strengthen your resolve - as Doonesbury said, "hold it to its box specs!" - or find something that will. Yield not to Microsoft or its marketing machine or its lousy OS - get the right tool for the right job, and sad to say, Windows is rarely the best tool for a job.