On 16 Apr 2004, at 20:30, Mac Canada wrote:
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 23:33:51 -0400 From: "Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Awful damn stupid was Mac User Groups Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 10:53:09PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:The people there suggested I should wholly embrace OSX as it was the greatest thing and would revolutionize the world of Macintosh.
The great thing about the computer world is that other users will force you to switch if the mother-company cannot ...
The way I look at it is like this: Mac OS reached its prime around System 7.1. Everything I use after that is for the sake of other people. It is sad when you have to do things that way, but I'm only willing to fight this battle to a certain degree -- which is to say that I'll have a computer which is powerful enough to handle the crap people dish out and I'll run a currently supported operating system, but I'm not going to accept all of the crap (eg. Word documents) and I'll run the OS of my choice (either Mac OS X or OpenBSD).
But I do agree with you: you should be able to run what you want without being harassed by other people, but that world ends the moment people expect you to exchange files with them.
Byron.
The grumpy Canuck.
I see no problem with running old hardware and/or software. My father still has a SE/20 (Prodigy 16 MHz 68020 accelerator) setup with an external 21" BW monitor running System 6.0.3 (6.0.4 isn't supported by the DayStar software) that my mother uses to fill in her time sheet (Excel 4.0 IIRC) and fax it to head office using a (much newer -- circa 1991) USR 14.4. I now use a PowerBook G3/400 "Pismo" (2000 vintage) with OS X 10.3.3 (you know your computer is turning into a tool and not a toy when you actually have to _check_ the version of the OS... this the first time this has happened in 17 years for me).
That said, I have no patience for someone seeking support for an older computer/OS and expecting people to know/remember/find out. If they happen to know, great. If not, there's an explanation for why they don't know -- it's too old. On some things I'm a treasure trove of information (at the risk of being immodest) and I'll try to pipe in. Using Macs for 20 years and having run _nearly_ every incarnation of Mac OS (excluding Systems 2, 4, 6.0 - 6.0.2, 7.1.x) on my Macs has given me just a little bit of Jerry-rigging expertise and even the know-how of how to run "impossible" combinations (like System 4.1 on a 512 K or used some really crude trickery to get System 3.2/5.3 with the HD20 extension to talk to a HFS formatted HD20 and 400 K HFS formatted disk (another one of those "no can do's"). Of course, much if not nearly all of this knowledge is now entirely obsolete and I might be hardpressed to figure out the work-arounds (I value my time more than the challenge of figuring out something that I already mastered as a teen once upon a time (it recently dawned on me that I'm about to turn 30 and I'm no longer the youngest and often the oldest in groups).
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