From: jrg@punch (James R. Goble)
Subject: Re: YA Mac horror story
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation; El Segundo, CA
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 15:53:52 GMT

In article <kfNAq3u00VqJ0_SUkW@andrew.cmu.edu> cj00+@andrew.cmu.edu (Carl  
B Jabido) writes:
> 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.

Gee Carl,
You seem like an intelligent guy, or at least you claim to be.  If you  
don't like the Mac, don't use it.  I'm sure a wave of apathy would sweep  
through the entire Mac community.

Jim Goble,
Los Angeles
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy