It would be a mistake to design for yesterday, or even for today.  That
15-minute load from tape can now be done in seconds from diskette or,
significantly, via even the slowest modem connection.  Imagine the situation
we'd be in if it had been mandated back in '85 that no individual program
could be larger than could be loaded in one minute from an audio cassette!

Until (and even after) bandwidth becomes truly cheap and ubiquitous Squeak's
late-bound resources can also be distributed on other media, as is still
done to this day with Linux and other software designed to be distributed
via the internet, but bandwidth WILL get cheaper and WILL be more widely
available; why constrain ourselves as though available technology will never
improve?

Gary Fisher


----- Original Message -----
From: <G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 4:05 AM
Subject: RE: A stupid newbie question


> Well, one of the problems is in these big pictures, for example from the
> school-page that take so long to download: Will people wait?
>
> When a kind of toys-are-us-company in the Netherlands did introduce the
> Commodore-64 on the market (1985?) they created a tutorial program you had
> to load from tape: took at least 15 minutes. Most of the buyers where
> already back to the shop to tell that their machine was broken.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Hinsley [mailto:jhinsley at telinco.co.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 6:45 AM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: A stupid newbie question
>
>
> Gary McGovern wrote:
>
> //big snip//
>
> > And the bandwidth
> > hasn't been good enough for the times when I've used Squeakland.
>
> If you're saying "I can't afford to stay on line long enough to play
> with the Squeakland stuff", I know that feeling. But don't forget that
> you can "save project to file" through the plug-in just as you can
> through your "real" Squeak. You can then load it into Squeak and play to
> your heart's content offline. I'm damned if I can remember where the
> plugin puts those files in Windows, though.
>
> //snipped//
> >
> > I'm not trying to convert you here, but I can't think of anything
simpler
> > than double clicking on an icon except single clicking on one. But who
am
> I
> > to say.
>
> I'm no longer sure of the context of this, but if it's simply to run
> Squeak, I think we've done it to death here! Of course, the drag file
> onto icon stuff is natural to Mac (and Kde) users.
>
> Cheers
>
> John
>
> --
> If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically
> destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep
> your
> system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.
>
>
>