On 23 October 2016 at 19:12, Fred Cisin <ci...@xenosoft.com> wrote: > But, I was explicitly referring to the time BEFORE OS-X! (<1999?)
Ahh, well, that's entirely fair then. > 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". That's... well, yeah, asshattish. Anyone who knew the Mac knew of viruses. They were a real problem. > 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. Can easily believe that. > 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. [Nod] Or they were seriously expensive. > 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!) Win 3.1 on a 386SX, no problem. Win 95 on a 386SX: sheesh. You'd need the patience of a saint. Early in my time at PC Pro magazine, I actually benchmarked 95 versus Wfwg on a 386 with 4MB. We had to hunt for a PC that old, and borrowed it from a friend of the editor. Amazingly, app loading was a hair quicker -- 95 had smarter cache management. But it wasn't fast. > 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". True. > Even the "remedial job training for the digital sweatshop" classes [Chuckle] > (WordPervert, Lotus, dBase, Weird, Office) [Guffaw] > were well suited for a large > number of 386SX machines. Yep, guess so! > 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). Oh my yes. And they were, $ for $, significantly more expensive in the UK than Stateside. > 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. :-( C21 IT. Everyone raves about it. I'm considered a weirdo for saying some things were better before. > 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. Well, TBH, I did some of that consultancy myself. I didn't dump any kit though. Some clients took the chance to refresh their whole office, and I made sure the old boxes were re-homed or given to charity. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)