"Sohodojo Jim" <salmons at sohodojo.com> wrote...
>	A 16 MHz 68020, with a math coprocessor, 4 MB of contiguous RAM (man, we
>thought we were flying when the most memory we had in our Fat Mac prior to
>the Prodigy was 512K!)... and the first commercial SCSI hard drive interface
>(our first Prodigy had a whooping 10 MB INTERNAL hard drive... that's right,
>the Levco guys figured out how to safely and effectively fit the Prodigy
>daughterboard AND a 'chimney-based' internal hard drive into the original
>Mac case!)... This was truly an amazing and groundbreaking machine.

Yes, there was definitely something magical about this level of performance.  We had the same experience inside Apple when we got hold of a couple of prototype "Big Macs" built by Rich Page that coupled a 16Mhz 68020 to a 1024x768 (monochrome) display.  Until this time, much of our Smalltalk and UI work was guided by a sort of intuition about what should be simple and what not, but always we were sort of drumming our fingers waiting for the processor to complete these wonderfully streamlined operations (things like find all senders, add an instance variable, etc), and unable to really use more than a couple of windows on screens smaller than VGA.

Then, suddenly, all the design for interaction paid off almost overnight,with the arrival of that next generation of hardware.  It was heady stuff.  I remember Scott Wallace was doing a lot of the heavy work on Fabrik in our group at the time.  He would typically work at home for a day or two and then come in to compare notes and exchange a demo or two.  When he got his Big Mac, he simply didn't come in or call in for two weeks.  Finally I called his home just to check that he was OK, and found him nearly expired.  As I recall he said something like, although we had built this incredible system in which you could literally change anything and keep running, until that time processor speed  and screen real estate had kept our ambitions in check.  Now, at a single stroke, those barriers had simply vanished, and we could just go on doing one thing after another with nothing to hold us back except, ultimately, our ability to stay awake.

	- Dan