From: panlilio@acs.ucalgary.ca (Victor P. Panlilio)
Subject: Re: Mac, of course (Was Re: IBM vs. Mac for stock business)
Summary: A UNIX guru gets caught in a wormhole
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 21:29:13 GMT
Expires: Sun, 31 Jan 1993 05:00:00 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta
Keywords: computers for photographers
Followup-To: rec.photo

In article <C0LLKp.Bss@ra.nrl.navy.mil> tse@ra.nrl.navy.mil (Anthony Tse) writes:

>    Yeah, an officemate of mine kept saying how slow Macs are,
>but of course, he was comparing a brand spanking new (at the time)
>486 33 with a 10 yrs old Mac IIx.  I would invite anyone to

Um, Anthony, *not* to flame you or anything, but the Mac IIx was
introduced in the Fall of 1987, as I recall. 486/33's came on the
market in volume only in 1991. And they were hideously expensive.

>    Someone also mention compatibility.  I have a Mac Plus runing
>System 7.  Try Window 3.1 on a 8080 PC.  Beside, no two PCs are alike.

A Plus running System 7? Uh, gee...

Um, there are no 8080 PC's. (That was the Altair and the IMSAI
from the late '70's -- yeah, I've been around for *that* long).
The IBM PC shipped in Aug.1981 with an Intel 8088 at 4.77 MHz.

I know what you're trying to say, though -- a Plus will actually
run System 7, but anything less than a 286 won't run Win 3.1.

Caveat: No matter how fast CPU's get, programmers will find ways
to bog them down or hobble them greatly, rest assured. 8^)

>I put a Sun, PC, Mac network together, nowhere have I seen such pain
>in the ass compatibility problem as in the PC world.  A packet driver
>worked great on one PC, died on another.  New packet driver worked
>great on the other PC, died on the first one.  And how many time

Why does this hellish scenario sound SO familiar, eh?  ;^)

>have I seen people struggling for days mucking around with IRQ and

Hey, for some people, this beats WORKING. And we wonder why
white-collar productivity hasn't increased with computer use...

>memory management.  Not to mention the ungodly slow PC/AT bus,
>try loading a multi-megabyte image file through a 8MHz bus then
>you will understand the meaning of slow.

Well, we do have EISA and Micro Channel, now. But I agree, most
people have ISA buses on their desktop PC's, and no SCSI, either.

>    No question Macs are expensive.  But you get what you pay for.
		 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yup, *that* they are. That's why I still don't have one. I'm
waiting for the first low-cost PowerPC Macs due in early 1994.

In the meantime, I keep lusting after Broncolor flash gear...

>I can slip a card into a Mac chassie with ease.  Everytime I have
>to put a full size card into a PC, I have to bend both the card
>and chassie to get the stupid card in.

Maybe you're working with el cheapo cards and el cheapo PC's. I
cannot recall having this sort of problem on high-quality PC's.

>    Having said all that, I am neither a Mac person nor a PC person,
>I like Unix boxes.

Yeah, but how many people can buy an SGI R4000 Indigo Elan, hmmm?

Or a Hasselblad 205TCC with all the new TCC lenses, plus a 553ELX
and the IR interface to control the Broncolor Pulso A powerpacks?

8^)

Victor
(Hardware lust -- I got it bad)
Newsgroups: rec.photo