But "Marketing" convinced the public that Macs were IMMUNE TO GETTING
VIRUSES! :-)
On Sun, 23 Oct 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
No no no -- hang on.
Classic MacOS was appallingly vulnerable. It had no user-account
security at all, and every disk had a tiny bit of code read and
executed when it was mounted, AIUI, to customise the icon etc.
Personal computer viruses more or less originated on the classic Mac.
But OS X is effectively immune to all of them, and AFAIK there are no
true viruses for OS X even now.
I can believe that. It is not impossible to redesign an OS to be immune
to boot sector viruses (especially if you aren't booting from the
floppies!), and reasonably resistant to most executable file viruses.
"Social engineering" will always be a threat, and virtually impossible to
counter, so long as there are college administrators.
But, I was explicitly referring to the time BEFORE OS-X! (<1999?)
Assholes who proclaimed themselves to be "experts" kept pushing our
college administration to SWITCH ALL of our our student computer labs from
PC to Mac, mostly using the LIE that "Macs are immune to viruses".
But, we stuck to 80-90% PCs.
1) We had a dozen Macs (mostly SE?) and 5 dozen PCs. We were getting
higher incidence of viurses on the Macs than the PCs, due to student
disks.
2) At the time, certain key pieces of software that we needed (such as
COBOL and FORTRAN compilers) were not as readily available on Mac.
3) We had only needed a tiny handful of machines with performance.
PC-DOS, Win3.1, and Win95 on 386SX were PERFECTLY suited for homework of
programming classes. (small homework assignments, NOT all day
production!) Think about anybody who would claim to NEED performance to
write "Hello, world". And low performance created BETTER sort programs,
by NOT giving the opportunity to "throw hardware at it".
Even the "remedial job training for the digital sweatshop" classes
(WordPervert, Lotus, dBase, Weird, Office) were well suited for a large
number of 386SX machines.
4) At the time, one dozen Macs cost us as much as five dozen PCs! List
prices for Macs might have been close to list prices of OEM PCs from IBM,
but we were willing to run cheap generic clones, and assemble them
ourselves. THAT was significant, when you have a lab FULL of students
(and rarely a waiting queue).
But, by about the time that OS-X came out, enough students had their own
machines that we no longer needed as many.
Our administration ceased having the Computer Information Systems
department run the labs for Business, Math, etc., and hired IT (mostly
grossly incompetents from "trade schools"). They were no longer "our
labs". Machines started being down for a week or two for a bad floppy or
need for Windoze reinstallation, waiting for IT to get around to them.
They hired an extremely expensive outside firm ("because they are
experts", and because the college "IT" had no idea how to do it!) to run a
public domain test program for Y2K compatibility, and dumpstered the few
machines that would have had to have their date manually set [ONCE!] after
Y2K.
