From: cj00+@andrew.cmu.edu (Carl B Jabido)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: YA Mac horror story
Date: 25 Jan 93 19:34:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: andrew.kfNAq3u00VqJ0_SUkW
Organization: Sophomore, H&SS general, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA

Well, where should I start?  I guess that dreadful day when my prof told
me we'd be using Object Pascal Genie for the class (surprisingly written
here at CMU on Macs, by a bunch of computer illiterates).  Into my head
popped up images of dialog boxes like "Cannot quit, not enough memory. 
Push okay."  Or even, "Low on memory, some functions will be disabled,"
after just opening a 29000 byte program.  I didn't even run it.  Didn't
even edit it!  By the way, this is all on a IIci with 8 megs of Physical
ram.

Well, I decided I'd see what software this Mac had, so I started looking
around.  Of course, I couldn't quit Genie Pascal because of low memory,
so I was using a crippled Mac.  I loaded up MacWrite II.  Pretty cool,
pretty neat.  I closed that window.  I then loaded up Mathematica. 
Pretty cool, pretty neat.  I closed that window.  Because I'm so lucky
with Macs, I started looking around again, and all of a sudden, the
system locked up.  Why?  Well, I was closing only the document, not the
whole app.  But wait, most other systems close the app when you close
the document, so why not the Mac?  I mean, it makes sense; if I'm not
gonna work on Document X which uses MacWrite II, why should Macwrite II
be loaded in the system?  
The stupid cluster people disabled cntrl-openapple-reset, so I had to
turn it off and on.  No big deal, but why they did it is still beyond me.
So, now I'm up and running again.  The stupid cluster people left
virtual memory off: how stupid.  So, I up it to 10 megs, so I can run
the God forbidden Pascal Genie.  I goto chooser and find the right
server.  Log in, and now, all of a sudden, the system locks up.  No cute
little watch cursor.  What's going on?  Oh, there it is, two small
arrows up in the corner, a place not normally looked at.  Network access
I guess.  Okay, I have my system again.  I double click on the new
volume (very nice implementation!  In fact, that's what OS/2 does too). 
Okay, I traverse the server till I get to my class section.  Wow, Mac's
built in network is slower than my NFS connection across the country;
hmmm.  After 1 minute of no usage time, I get to use the system again. 
Wow, the file I need is 512k.  Should I do it?  Ahh, I guess there's no
other way.  After a 2 minute file transfer of only 512k, it returns
control too me.  I note that I could have made the same file transfer
over FTP at a little over 1.3E3 bytes per second on my "horrible OS/2
PC."  
I ftp everything to my computer, so I can do my work on my system
instead.  So, I ftp to my ftp server on my computer.  I transfer
everything, again noting that transfer rates were only about 8k per
second.  I attribute that to the Mac of course.  I also try transferring
something from my computer to the Mac.  I then realize that Macs have a
limit of 32 characters on filenames.  Much smaller than 256.

Jeez, what a relief to get out of there.

Carl Jabido

ps- that was mostly true.  the exaggerated parts weren't exaggerated
that much, at least no more than 10%.  BTW, I'm not that stupid, I'm
just making obvious remarks.  Just to piss off some Mac owners.  I had
to wake you up to the fact that Macs aren't the ultimate computer. 
There are some nice things about the system.  Generally however, I don't
like it.  It may be easy to use, in fact, I'll personally vouch for the
fact that it's probably the easiest computer to use to date.