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It's not that amateurish a question. The answer is going to suprise
you. This is only my opinion on why things are as they are, other
people's opinions, memories of past events, etc. may vary.
The Mac operating system is stable mainly because it was released in
a form that was fairly useful to programmers, as-is. It was also fairly
difficult to access hardware directly, much easier to use the all of
Apple's convenient, official libraries and tools. Also, relatively few
companies made hardware for it, so there wern't that many people kernal
hacking for drivers. Also, the Mac used a Motorola 68000 architecture
that made it easy to write safe programs that really couldn't hurt
eachother accidentally (although you could get malicious).
But good memory managment and good program protection are not the only
ingredients you need to bake a quality speech recognizer. We'll get to
the other's in a minute.
MS-DOS, on the other hand, had many preceived weaknesses, and a system
architecture that made it easy for everyone to access hardware directly,
and lots of people making hardware and putting together drivers with
differing degrees of software quality. When Windows first came out, it
was built on top of this shifting, unprotected DOS. It also used memory
managment compatible with the original Intel 8088 architecture, with a
maximum of 640k of RAM, only addressible in little 64k chunks. People
still wrote directly to hardware, so different programs exhibited strange
incompatabilities with eachother.
It wasn't until about 1993 or 94, when Microsoft came out with Win32s (an
addition to Windows 3.1) that mainstream windows could even access large
amounts of memory without having to break it up into little 64k chunks
(what we call "flat" memory) the way the Mac does.
Then Windows 95 came out, which leapfrogged the Mac by adding real
preemptive multitasking, threads, and interprocess communication, in
addition to flat memory. Now, we have a friendly place for
speech recognizers. Not as friendly as UNIX, which had all that neat
stuff since the 1970's, but useable.
The problem with Windows 95 is the need to make it "backward compatible"
with basically every program ever written since the dawn of micro-
computers (say around 1976). So it still preserves all the kernal
services and unprotected operating modes that previous versions of
Windows had, (and all the excentricities of the origional CP/M operating
system, which MS-DOS is basically a clone of) and misbehaved programs can
still cream the system.
Apple has finally come out with a version of the Mac OS (I believe it's
system 8.1) that can do everything you need for speech, but it's
difficult to see why people would start writing recognition software for
it. With only a small percentage of computerdom running macs, and only a
small percentage of those running the new Mac OS, the market for Mac
recognition cannot be that large.
As far as stability of the current Mac OS: as soon as Apple went to an
"open architecture" with the Mac II and started letting hardware vendors
plug all sorts of stuff into it and write their own system code, things
began to deteriate. When they kept releasing different versions of the
OS, with new feature that were not backwards compatible with the old
versions, forcing software developers into quick rewrites and band-aid
fixes, Mac stability began to decline.
Windows stability (as long as you stay away from the more obscure
hardware vendors) actually seems to be on the rise. I have a few Win 95B
machines that can be up for weeks at a time.
I still prefer my NT and UNIX boxes. The NT machine on my desk usually
stays on for two weeks at a time (hardware upgrades every other week, not
a good way to maintain system stability. I really should practice what I
preach). No crashes. Individual applications may crash, some mor often
than others, but nothing takes this system down. It's very conservative
in it's hardware. Today's configuration Dell Pentium Pro, 128 megs RAM,
NEC CD, HP CR-RW, Turtle Beech Fiji, SyJet (a major headache for me) Zip
drive, Madge Token Ring (another headache), Matrox Millenium, Adaptec
2940W SCSI, 2 Quantum Atlas and a Seagate Baracuda. And an alarm system.
Other similar Dells in my area have gotten stripped.
On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Taku Kato wrote:
> Please forgive me if this posting sounds off-topic or amateurish.
> Many people on the voice-users list have pointed out that Windows 95 is an
> inherently fragile OS that is prone to crashing.
>
> I too, experience about one serious lock-up per day when using Windows 95.
> If I were more computer-savvy, and if there were more software available on
> the market, I would consider switching to a more stable OS such as Linux or
> OS/2.
>
> However, since neither of these conditions are applicable in my case, the
> only other OS which comes to mind for which there is a reasonable amount of
> software available is the Apple MAC OS.
>
> From a computer science point of view, how stable is the MAC OS? Has
> anybody bothered to pit the MAC OS against WIndows 95 in one-on-one tests to
> measure system stability?
>
> Taku Kato (six10351@@first.win.or.jp)
Joseph S. Wisniewski | Views expressed are my own, and don't reflect
Ford Motor Company | those of the Ford Motor Co. or affiliates.
Project Sapphire | LeMans, Daytona, Bonneville, and Sebring are
jwisniew@@ford.com | just races, won by people driving Ford cars!
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