I s.~.s.T.E.M'I-. R.E;V.'~.E.WI

The

?;. ?;. , 7% The ew computers-indeed, few consumer figure 1) the system costs $2990. The pro- many items of any kind-have generated cessor is a , running a name- F such a wide range of opinions as the less (see the text box. 'A $ facets of a Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick Second Opinion" on page 248 for a full slightly and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the description). It has absolutely no IBM PUMS Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it DOS compatibility, and it would appear Ap- flawed gem lives up to that potential remains to be seen. ple plans none. Personally, I think the Macintosh is a won- 1- - 1- derful machine. I use one daily at work, and lNE then at night I play with the one I have at The display is small (9-inch diagonal). but it BY BRUCE ' home. Or, at least, I try to play with it. You see, has very high resolution (512 by 342 pixels). . my wife-who for years resisted all my at- Every pixel is crisp. Several things make the tempts to introduce her to computers-has display unusual. First, the Macintosh has no fallen in love with the Mac (her words, not "text mode:' Instead, the display is always bit- mine). She uses it to type up medical reports, mapped graphics. Second, the display is black- notes on her clients, and personal letters. In on-white rather than amber-, green-, or - fact, she's suggested that we get a second on-black, giving it an ink-on-paper effect. Macintosh so that we won't have to fight over Third, the pixels are equally dense both hori- the one we have. zontally and vertically, eliminating the "aspect- ,The Macintosh is not without its problems. ratio" problem that plagues other graphics Resources are tight-it needs more memory systems. (In other words, a box 20 pixels wide and disk space-and software has been slow and 20 pixels high will be a square.) in coming to market. Many have criticized its The effect is excellent. The display is clear, price ($2495).In fact, there are indications that crisp. easy to read, and easy on the eyes. Apple considered a lower price ($1995)and Because all text is graphically generated, true then rejected it. It doesn't seem to have hurt "what you see is what you get" word process-

the Mac's market-people are still buying ' ing is available (with multiple fonts, sizes, and them faster than Apple can make them-but styles). Embedded drawings and proportional there's the potential for backlash if the spacing are also possible. Some criticism has machine doesn't deliver on all its promises. been made about the lack of a color-graphics Whatever its problems and limitations. the capability. Frankly, I am unconvinced of its Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting necessity. Most applications I have seen use computers to work with people instead of vice color graphics as a substitute for detail, and versa. Time and again, I've seen individuals the Mac can give you lots of detail. (An inter- with little or no computer experience sit down esting footnote: the QuickDraw graphics rou- in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks tines in the Mac's ROM do provide for color, with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they although Apple has not announced any inten- use the same words to describe it: "amazing" tions for supporting such.) and "fun:' The question is whether "power- The Mac's display does create a problem. ful" can be added to that list. Computer graphics are memory-intensive: In an industry rapidly filling up with IBM PC once you start drawing pictures, you start clones. the Macintosh represents a radical using up lots of memory. The video display departure from the norm. It is a small, light? itself consumes about 22K bytes (or about weight computer with a high-resolution one-sixth) of the total RAM. Any off-screen screen, a detached keyboard, and a mouse manipulation (windows) or information (text (see photo 1). It comes with 128K bytes of fonts) chews up additional memory quickly. RAM (random-access readlwrite memory), 64K bytes of ROM (read-only memory), and lNE a 400K-byte 3M-inch disk drive. If you throw Like the rest of the machine, the keyboard is in an Imagewriter printer (see photo 2 and significantly different from those found on

8 B Y T E AUGUST 1984 - A - , *-,. . ..., & .'

mouse. This is a nuisance if you have only one or two characters to delete. I'd also like the mouse's cord to be a little longer and sometimes I have trouble finding enough surface area to work the mouse, but these are minor complaints. The mouse is an excellent feature of the Macintosh.

Macintosh's user interface is far different from those of other personal com- puters. Strictly speaking, it is not all that new. The original concepts were pio- neered at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) several years ago. Apple used them heavily in the original Lisa machine, released a year before the Mac. However. that Lisa sold for Photo 2: The Macintosh dot-matrix printer. $10,000, and the Xerox machines for much more. The people who most needed the interface were those who could least afford it: small business- This is 9-point text, 6mova. people, students, etc. The Macintosh is This is 12-point text. still a bit expensive, but it's within the reach of far more people than any of This is 14-point tex its predecessors. In creating the Macintosh's unique This is 18-point user interface, Apple has attempted to This is %!-point kxt. Bmm. make the abstract seem concrete. Few things are as abstract as the data and This is 12-point text, bold. programs stored and used on a com- puter. The Mac takes that abstraction This is 14-point text, bol and presents it as something familiar: a desktop cluttered with pencils, papers, This is 18-point text, bold. manila folders, and even a wastebasket. Pnis is 9-point taxt, New York, adMa Bm kid. Do you want to put a document in a folder? Pick it up with the mouse and This is 12-point text. ~ew~ork, bold. put it in the folder. Do you want to This is 1 4-point t8xt. New York, bold. throw something away? Pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. Abstractions This is. if)-point text, bold. take on real forms that we can under- stand and use without obscure com- mands or bizarre syntax. Figure 1: A sample printout from the Macintosh wing its printer and the MacWrite word- Another important aspect of this user processing program. The printout was obtained using MaNritts high-quality output mode, interfaceis the way in which the Macin- as opposed to the draft and ordinary quality modes. The output here is shown at 100 per- tosh commands available to the cent of actual size. user. As I write this review with Mac- Write, the top of my screen has an or Command key down with my left up again. Often this process has to be Apple symbol and six words (File, Edit. hand while moving the mouse with my repeated several times. With the mouse, Search, Format, Font, and Style) written right. I find using the mouse faster, I never take my eyes off the screen. I just across the top. If I point at any of the easier, and less disruptive than using reach to my right, grab the mouse, and items with the mouse and press the but- function and cursor keys. Function and do what I need to do. ton, a menu of options appears on the cursor keys do not fall within the stan- Of course, the mouse isn't always a screen. When 1 release the button, the dard touch-typing layout because they perfect solution. Some commands can menu disappears. All available com- vary in size, number, position, and func- be tedious to perform via the mouse mands appear in the menus. I haven't tion. To use them. I have to stop and and pull-down menu. For example. had to memorize or learn much; in fact. think about what key 1 need, look down deleting text to the right of the cursor I opened my MacWrite manual only at the keyboard, find it, hit it, and look in MacWrite can only be done with the (continued)

240 B Y T E AUGUST 1984 20525 Mariani Ave.

RAM: 64K bytes of ROM Display: 9-inch built-in monitor: high-resolution

optical shaft encoding Mass storage: built-in

serial ports (230.4K bps

64K/128K

Operating System Proprietary unnamed

MAC IBM PC 0APPLE ILE

Documentation 160-page user's manual

WUSP:&&%"BFTB P.. , c . .. * The rear of the Mac. Note the icon labels. The &morn row of The top of the Mac with the cover removed. The disk drive and connectors is Foa (from let?) the mouge, second Floppy disk, digital circuitry are bdw the cathderay tube: the analog printer, modem. and speaker. circuitry is to its left. DISK ACCESS IN BASIC BASIC PERFORMANCE

50 * 0 SIEVE CALCUCbT IOMS SPREADSHEET (MULTIPLAN)

SF0 LOAD nECALCVLATE 2 IBM,PC APPLE IIE file using the system utilities. TkSpreadskt graph shows how bg the computers take to laad and recalculate a 2 5- by 2 T-cell spread- sheet where each ceil equals 1.001 times the cell to its left. The spread- sheet program used was Microsaft Multiplan. The time for the for- m&ik copy test on the Macintosh rsflects usipg tkdiskcopy utility on a single-drive sygem. Four disk-swaps are required for the corn- plete disk copy, the time far which is included in the benchmark. "rhe Sieve benchmark couldn't be run on the Mac (seetext for detaikl. **The new Disk Copy program was rmt glrailabh at press time. REVIEW MACINTOSH

once or twice, briefly. The same is true at the "desktop" level. Any actions can Apple is pl@nning to upgrade the Mac to 5 12K be performedvia the pulldownmenus bytes sometime in the future, 6ut that still leaves or by direct "physical" manipulation of the objects shown. he best feature of 97 percent of the potential memory space the Mac documentation is that 1 almost never have to refer to it. UMUS~~and unusa62e. My one complaint about the user in- terface is that it's slow. Sometimes run- potential memory space unused and away at your free space. Second. there ning a program or opening a file seems unusable. The Mac has no provisions for will be no standard for software devel- to take longer than it should. File copy- expanding memory beyond replacing opers when the 5 12K-byte upgrade be- ing on a one-drive system is also the 64K-bit chips it currently uses with comes available. Many software devel- 2 56K-bit chips as they become avail- opers are ignoring (or unable to use) the A special disk-copy utility is now avail- able. It has no expansion slots and no 128K-byte machine and will release their able that lets you copy an entire disk external bus. And remember, this is a packages for 512K-byte machines only. in just four swaps-not too shabby when graphics-intensive environment where Unless Apple plans a free update to all you realize that this utility uses nearly memory often gets eaten up rather Mac owners, the standard environment 80 percent of the total RAM just to hold quickly. will no longer be standard. the data. Unfortunately, this utility won't So the question arises: why did the Another argument I've heard to sup- solve the problem of copying several Macintosh design team so limit their port the concept of such limited mem- files onto a disk that's already formatted machine? The most common reason ory is that the expansion slots were and in use. There is a simple solution: I've come across is that the Macintosh dropped to avoid power and cooling team wanted to provide a standard en- problems and to keep the user out of vironment for software developers and the machine. Again, this is a good idea MEMORYLIMITATIONS users (although the latter is less often if you provide sufficient resources in the The 68000 is a powerful microprocessor cited). In other words, software devel- unexpandable model. I have no com- but it has a limited environment in the opers know that a Mac will always have plaints with Apple's choice of two Macintosh. The Mac comes with 128K 128K bytes of RAM and users will never RS-422A ports. an external disk port. bytes of RAM: less than 11100th of the have to worry about softwarerequiring the mouse port, and audio output. Ex- lbmegabyte RAM the 68000 could use, more RAM than they have. The idea is ternal video would be nice, but it isn't and there's no way to expand it. 'llue, sound, byt it causes two problems. First, critical. But there's just not enough Apple is planning to upgrade the Mac 128K bytes is not enough RAM for a memory. to 512K bytes sometime in the future, standard, especially in the Macintosh Others argue that 128K bytes of RAM but that still leaves 97 percent of the environment, where graphics chew is enough because so much of the work is done for you in the 64K-byte ROM. The ROM toolbox (the optimized 68000 machine-language routines that handle all aspects of the user interface) is truly a marvelous thing, but it doesn't change the fact that large, complex programs need lots of memory, especially if the displays are all graphical. A supporting , argument points to MacPaint and Mac- Write, saying,"See,these work fine!" Yes, they do, but both have easily reached limits. Furthermore. these programs were developed over a long period of time, concurrently with the Macintosh. The authors of these programs knew a lot about optimizing code for the Mac. Software developers with less time and more ambitious designs will find the lack of RAM a serious roadblock. I also have heard that the upgrade to 512K bytes will eliminate all such prob- lems because there will be more than o 3: The Macintosh keyboard. Note the absence of a control key but the presence in- enoughRAM forany of a "clouerleap' key just to the left of the space bar. This key performs several of the disagree. can never have enough ions usually performed by a control key. RAM. I think it no accident that the (wntinued) REVIEW: MA VTOSH

chips used in the IBM PC and compat- three months since the Macintosh was Apple says the 68000 ibles, yet most of those systems can use released, and all the Apple dealers in is much better than the more RAM than the Mac. Where's the town have only three software packages advantage? for the Mac besides MacPaint and Mac- 808618088 chips used Obviously, I think that 128K bytes is Write, which are still bundled. Mac not enough RAM to make the Macin- should have had at least double the ini- in the IBM PC and its tosh a truly powerful machine. My at- tial and upgrade RAM, i.e.. 2 56K bytes tempt to run the Sieve of Eratosthenes and I megabyte, respectively. It may be compati6les, yet they benchmark on the Mac provides one in- that Apple will release yet another up- dication of its RAM limitations. Once grade when 1-megabit chips become can use more RAM BASIC was loaded into the Mac, there available in mass quantities. or they may was too little space left in memory for just release a new machine. than the Mac. the Sieve program. To fit the program Although the RAM is a limitation on into memory, I had to declare all vari- the Macintosh, the ROM is a tremen- Commodore 64, with 64K bytes, has ables integer. This will, of course, speed dous strength. In what is undoubtedly dominated the lowend market over ma- the execution time considerably. Thus. one of the marvels of modem program- chines that have (or had) 8K. 16K, or the speed of the Mac Sieve is not com- ming, the Macintosh design team 24K bytes. Apple gave the 11c. which mensurable to the other two systems. crammed an unbelievable amount of uses an &bit 6502 chip. 128K bytes of (If you are curious, the modified bench- power into the 64K bytes of ROM in the RAM. Why the company limited the mark took 96.4 seconds g the Mac.) form of tightly written, highly optimized 68000, a 32-bit chip, to the same initial The upgrade to 512K bytes will help machine code. In doing so, the team amount of memory is beyond me. Even considerably, but it's still an inexcusable provided standard user interfaces so the fourfold upgrade is too limiting. limit. I am convinced that this limited that most application programs on the Apple delights in stating how much bet- RAM has held up the release of Mac Mac will be used in similar forms. I tried ter the 68000 is than the 808618088 software. As I write this, it has been (continued

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he Macintosh is advertised as a drive. Unfortunately, this is precisely the of these packages was being marketed. 128K-byte machine. In reality, the kind of design flaw that will prevent the The only language currently available, TFinder (Macintosh's operating sys- Macintosh from gaining widespread Microsoft BASIC, is extremely disappoint- tem) and other systems software take acceptance in a business environment. ing. Programs written with it will essen- about 40K bytes. Subtract from this Disk backups are absolutely essential to tially look like MBASIC prerams written anather 40K to 70K bytes for any applica- business applications. Therefore, the for the IBM PC. Even when Apple's lan- tions programs that may be in memory need for a second drive is a hidden and guage packages for the Macintosh are and the 128K-byte Macintosh becomes unadvertised cost of owning the machine. released, users should not expect to be an 18K- to 38K-byte machine For ex+ A11 things considered. the Desk able to produce application programs am~le.when Mac's Microsoft BASIC Accessories (accessory programs that that utilize Macintosh features like the paikage is loaded on top of the resident can be run at the same time as another menu bar, dialogue bores, and windows. software, there is only 13K bytes of space program) are an excellent complement to Because any language that is run on a for programs and data left. Similarly, Mac- the . These accessories are avail- Macintosh will be treated like an applica- Write, Macintosh's word-processing pro- able to the user at all times regardless tion program, these routines will be in- gram. only allows documents with a max- of the application program that may be accessible to programs created at a lower imum size of about 24K bytes This prob- resident in memory. This means, of level than the application program that lem seems to be an inherent limitation course. that users will be able to cut and uses those features. The Macintosh ap in the current design of the Macintosh paste between diverse application plicati~nsthat use those features are be- because there is no way to expand the programs. Although not as sophisticated ing done ctirrently in one d two ways. memory capacity of the machine. When as Lisa's information-passing capability. They are either created on a Lisa and 2 56K-bit memciy chips become available the Macintosh currently is the only downloaded to the Mac, or two Macs are the Macintosh will be upgraded to a machine in its price range that provides used in tandem (one for writing the pro- 512K-byte machine, enough space for the this feature as a system-resident function. gram and the other for running it). De- most ambitious application programs. However, sometimes the Finder does its veloping software in this fashion can However, at the time of this writing these job too well. If there are two or three disk be an expensive proposition. chips are only in the development stage. icons present on the desktop, each with Although Apple has indicated that pro- This means that they will not be commer- a copy of the System Folder, calling up grammers will be given assistance in de- cially available before 1985. a Desk Accessory such as the Alarm veloping application programs for Macin- Clock will cause the Finder to request that tosh, in fact this assisdance will be avail- DrsK SWAPPING the disk under which the system was ini- able only to a certain chosen few, i.e.. Closely related to the memory limitations tialized be inserted. The Finder then gets established software houses or in- is the problem of "disk swapping:' the data pertaining to the Desk Accessory dividuals who have a proven track record Because the basic Mac~ntoshsystem has from that disk's System Folder instead of of commercial success. Of course, one only ,one disk drive* transferring data using the System Folder of the disk that can always purchase the technical manual from one disk to an- requires that the was in the internal drive. After the Finder for Macintosh, which presumably con- Macintosh read from ehe input disk, eject gets that information. the user must then tains all of the information regarding the the input disk, and prompt the user to reinsert the disk he or she was originally highly touted Macintosh toolbox, and at- insert the output disk. After sending the working with to display the accessory Al- tempt to develop Mac applications from data to that disk, it is eMted and the user though not a major inconvenience. this scratch. It can be obtained from Apple is told to reinsert the input disk. This cycle procedure does become somewhat ag- for $150. Regrettably, it is unlikely that a is repeated until the data transfer is gravating when one wants to do a simple "cottage industry" will grow up around complete. Initially, this shuffling of disks thing like set the Alarm Clock. the Mac in the same way that one grew seemed to be tolerabke. At least I thought around the Apple 11. But in spite of its it was until I attempted to back up a disk 'SPERSPECTIVE shortcomings the Macintosh is a signifi- with 27QK bytes of data on it. It toqk Nothing much has been said about cant advance in user-friendly computing. more bn40 disk swaps and 20 minutes Macintosh from the programmer's point to perform this simple operation. This of view. Unfortunately, the reason for this ...... '*....* works out to an effective transfer rate of is that there is very little to say. Tbe J. Edward Ch(1307 W& Addisan St.. about 5K bytes per swap. The process Macintosh is the only machine in recent Chicago, IL 6061 3) is an attam HE received becomes even more hectic when the Mac history to be offered without a program- his B.A. in psychofogy fm Ea8erp1 llhnois has to consult systems software during ming language. HoweverePApple has pro- University and his J.D. from Sdartkr~tlllinois the transfer. The user must then swap mised . BASIC and University His hobbies include readiw, spats, three disks in and out of the internal Pascal for the Mac As of April 1984 none and fiddling wiffi whim.

a{; a{; d 248 AUGUST 1984 REVIEW MACINTOSH

. Creative Solutions Inc. (CSI) had hit the . .shelves. (CSI already had a commercial-. ly avairable. 68000-based FORTH.) By the time you read this, the trickle

because graphics capability increases as and some things (such as pulling in or ap- . 1 found Multiplan easy to use-easier, memory does. And the programs them- pending files)are awkward or impossible, in fact, than any other spreadsheet I've selves will not have to be as tightly coded Still, it's great fun. used. But I do have a few complaints. The to fit into available memory; therefore. MacPaint is also destined to be a documentation assumes a fair amount of they will be developed more quickly. I classic. Admit it: you've always wanted to knowledge on the part of the user, a poor

page). In seconds. you can create images MACWRITEAND MACPAINT that would take you hours by hand (if you Both MacWrite and MacPaint are great. could do them at all).Children and adults The IF function evaluates the logical Get them, use them, and have fun with can learn to use it in an amazingly short expresdion, then returns the value-if- them. time (a tribute to Bill Atkinson). My boss true if the expression is TRUE: or it MacWrite gives you nine different fonts. and I laid out a 16-page manual for a new returns the value-if-false if the expres- six different point sizes, five different software product in two days, complete sion is FALSE. styles (mix and match), and superscript- with borders, boxes for illustrations, and There are no examples and no explana-

some prerelease programs with no data and if you can copy it easily. How- disk and prompts you for a new one. documentation and I was. able to use ever, the system files on a Macintosh The 128K-byte Macintosh with one them almost immediately. 'Ry that disk take up over 200K bytes, or half the singlesided dri~eis not a poweeul under CP/M or MS-DOS. The ROM disk. Even with trimming, you only have makhine. You can do useful work with toolbox is a vital facet ~f the overall about 220K bytes of usable space on it, and the user interface beam11 others amazing nature of the Macintosh. a bootable disk. If any other company cold. But for the same price or less. I The hrlacintoslr also lacks adequate marketed a CP/M or MS-DOS system could go out and buy, for example, a mass storage. At first, it doesn't look with a drrgle disk drive with only 220K Compaq with 2 56K bytes of RAM and bad: it consists of one singlesided bytes of free space, no one would buy two 360K-byte disk drives. And 1 could - 3%-inch built-in disk drive (made by it. It takes a lot of time and disk swap- get lots of software for it-programs that Sphy) holding 400K bytes. Having only ping to copy files or to back up a disk. can handle larger, more difficult tasks . . . .= , cone disk drive can be a nuisance, but The Mac's 'sly saving grace on this than the Mac currently can. - it's acceptable if the drive hdlds enough point is tliwt&&wil~dy *upsh*B w: .,I - REVIEW MACINTOSH

tion of what a "logical expression" is or BASIC is useful. Several public-domain in FORTH professionally for a how it resolves to true or false. The in- programs for it have already shown up I am by no means an expert.) dex refers us to the definitions of NOT on computer bulletin boards, including dow, menu, and graphics functions~are or OR: the latter gives us a little more in- a terminal-emulation program and a ,well done and easy to use For example, formation and one complex example 68000 disassembler. The program is if you create a window called Easel, and (demonstrating IE OR. AND. and NOT). available for $195 from Microsoft Cor- a program to run within Easel called This will be confusing to novice users. poration (10700 Northup Way, Bellevue. Sketch, the FORTH command EASEL But consider getting Multiplan anyway. WA 98004). 0N.ACTIVATE SKETCH links Sketch to Not only does it work well, it can share Easel. If you select the Easel wjndow with its information with other Microsoft pro- MACFORTH the mouse. the Sketch program will auto- grams. such as BASIC, Word, Chart, and MacFORTH (Level I) lets you do amaz- matically start eiecuting. File. The program is available from Micro ing things on the Macintosh. You can All in all, CSI has done an excellent job. soft Corporation (10700 Northup Way, create windows complete with close and It has made FORTH relatively easy to Bellevue, WA 98004) for $195. size boxes and "attach" programs that learn. The documentation is easy to read will execute automatically when a given and use, although the glossary can be MICROSOFTBASIC window is activated. You can build your cryptic to a FORTH neophyte. Best of all. Microsoft BASIC is fairly standard. It does own pull-down menus with check marks, CSI has unlocked a lot of the Mac's have lots of Mac-specific graphics calls. inactive items, and command-key options. power. FORTH produces very CQmpact However, most of the them are poorly In fact, you could code your own applica- code. which means that the Mac's limited documented: instead, the documentation tion and have it "take over" the Mac, put- RAM isn't so limited anymore, refers you to the QuickDraw Programmer's ting up its own menu bar and controll- CSI has three levels of MacFORTH. I Guide, which doesn't come with the ing all the windows. reviewed Level 1 ($149). which is de- system. The only catch to all of this is that you signed as an introductory package. It The BASIC itself runs in an environment have to learn FORTH, a programming lan- does all the things 1 mentioned, but it with three windows: Command. Output. guage unlike any other. FORTH isn't dif- doesn't support real (floating-point) and List. All commands. typing. and ficult to learn, but it can be a bit confus- or all of the ROM toolbox rou- editing take place in the Command win- ing to use because of its stack orienta- tines. Level 11 ($249). aimed at in-house dow: program output and echoed com- tion and "reverse Polish notation" syntax. developers, has real numbers and ad- mands show up in the Output window; CSl's Going FORTH module helps a bit. vanced graphics as well as provisions for and program text is seen in the List win- Going FORTH is a clever program that inserting 68000 assembly routines. Level dow. It all works nicely, although I find sets up two side-by-side windows. One 111 ($2500) is for software developers in- a few things annoying. The Command/ window steps you through an introduc- terested in marketing programs devel- Output window dichotomy can cause tion to FORTH. The other is an active oped in MacFORTH. It includes.technical problems, especially when the Output FORTH window, where you can try out support, a run-time package, and licenses window insists on writing text behind the the things you're learning. Also, each for 2 50 copies. Additional licenses cost Command window (and nowhere else). chapter in the printed documentation is $5 per copy. Also, the List window has a tendency to a tutorial on a given subject (menus. win- If you want to make your Mac do things. propagate itself, so that you end up with dows, etc.) with lots of examples to key get a copy of MacFORTH and have fun. several List windows stacked behind each in and try out. MacFORTH is available from Creative other. I think CSI has developed a solid Solutions Inc. (4801 Randolph Road. Even with its shortcomings. Microsoft FORTH implementation. (I programmed Rockville, MD 20852). with 128K bytes of RAM, a 400K-byte this page) has done much to quell my Macintosh. In the right configuration, it disk drive, and an lmagewriter printer, reservations. I can now create my own can do as much as any microcomputer is an amazing machine but not really a windows, graphics, and pull-down on the market. However, you should go powerful one. A 5 12IGbyte Mac with two menus, and the "fun quotient" of my for a 512K-byte system with two disk 400K-byte disk drives is both amazing Mac has made a quantum leap. Msides, drives and a printer. Anything less and and powerful, but it is also expensive I suspect that by the time this sees print, you'll find yourself frustrated by the ($3 500, including printer and not coun- prices will have dropped and the soft- machine's limits. ting any cost for the RAM upgrade). In ware base will have expanded I have no doubt that I would have the two-and-a-half months that I've own- considerably. bought a Macintosh sooner or later, and ed my Mac. I've often wondered if 1 I have no intention of getting rid of the should have bought one so quickly. one I own. The Mac's a gem-rough. However, the arrival of MacFORTH (see You won't find another machine that's slightly flawed, but a gem none- the text box "Software for the Mac" on as easy to use or as much fun as.the theless. . AUGUST 1984 BYTE 251