let's stop whining about MCL and port to Franz for Windows

[philg@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Philip Greenspun)]

Having worked at both the MIT A.I. Lab and Symbolics, I think I can
claim to have some experience in watching good ideas die :-)

1) Apple has a 10% market share

2) Apple hasn't introduced anything dramatically new since 1984
(PowerPC for example comes 16 years after RISC in research labs and 10
years after RISC in the market place)

3) The computer marketplace is very unkind to companies that have
small market shares and don't continue to innovate.

These three items together should ensure that the Macintosh becomes a
curiosity within a few years.

Has anyone out there managed to hold his nose long enough to start up
MS/Windows and run Franz Allegro CL/PC?  Franz claims it is winning
(surprise!) and it should run fairly briskly on a Pentium.  If you are
developing a commercial application, you'll find a market 5-10X larger
on Windows.

(Of course, we could all switch back to the Symbolics environment, now
that it has been ported to the DEC Alpha.)

I'll add my vote to those urging Apple to port MCL, but trying to get
any Fortune 500 company to respond to customers is a Fool's Errand.
Apple executives are on top of a 100-story building; we are like ants
scurrying around on the ground.  Not only wouldn't they understand our
shouts if they could hear us, but they are so far away from us that
our squeaks are drowned out by the rustling of the clouds.

--

      -- Philip Greenspun

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