From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields)
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Subject: Re: COMMENTS ON FAQ
Date: 14 Dec 92 19:31:19 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor

In article <1992Dec14.171823.19291@dgbt.doc.ca> ted@dgbt.doc.ca (Ted Grusec) writes:
>
>Thanks for the try, jeff and gnat.  But, if I may voice an opinion, I
>find a problem with the faq.
>
>I don't want to start a flame war about hardware platforms. 
>But the fact is that, in Nth.America, IBM
>(mostly clones) is the major hardware by way of sheer numbers.  Your

Ok, I'll comment on that.  The following is mostly my personal opinions.

1) At this date IBM is indeed the major hardware in the business world.
But people trying to get something serious done in DTP tend to prefer
machines for which a graphic interface is a given, not an extra like
MOUSE.COM and WINDOWS (I work on a 486 at work, btw, and a II ci at home).
And nobody trying to get any really serious signal crunching done would
look seriously at either Mac or IBM but would go with either one of those
with special purpose add-on hardware or more likely some sort of mini
or mainframe computer, probably RISC-based, perhaps with a lot of parallelism
and optimized pipelining and matrix hardware in it, like Suns, Decs,
Irises,...Crays.  But naturally, that means that not individuals but rather
institutions generally own such machines.

2) There's a serious base productivity question involved.  I have no
problem assigning a bunch of techheads to learn DOS and Windows.  But
consistently, the best electronic compositions are composed by people
who are composers first, techies second.  A classic example of this was
when the great Brooklyn composer (now at Berkeley) Ira Mowitz came from
outside of electronic music to win the Borges Prize with his "memoire
d'un ami."  Ira's no slouch with computers, but that's not what makes his
music delicious.  If I can direct my students to the musical issues rather
than the difficulty of setting properties for icons when reorganizing
disk directories, this is to be preferred.  In US academia, Macs outnumber
IBM clones about 3 to 1 according to one informal survey.  Programmers prefer
programming for the IBM because it's easier---and they're the only ones who
have to know how to use half their programs.  But few folks who've used
other platforms prefer IBMS.

3) The main reason so many IBMs are in the business world is momentum:
a niche for automation opened around 1959, and IBM was there.  The
fear of retooling and the investment companies have made in that technology
are the main reasons IBM technology persists.  Compatibility is no longer
an issue: between the nearly universal adoption of ascii and RTF, and the
competition cutting along different lines between Microsoft's Truetype
font technology and Adobe's Postscript page description programming langueage
(which contains its own font technology), and third-party import filters and
emulators of almost any platform in software or hardware on almost any
other platform (but these ARE expensive), the whole question of compatibility
is breaking down.

4) Finally, in closing, let me quote the immortal Elton Cookson (who?):
"Electricity is a passing fad, so have a little something else to do when
Silicon Valley goes bust."

-Matt