On Nov 29, 2005, at 6:53 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
I expect too that a lot of the potential the Macs had in CPU cycles
was
severely degraded by their relatively poor net-working performance
(until
late). That's pretty much why Syquest media was so popular in Mac
environments
for such a long time, it was quicker to walk data across a room on
a Syquest
disk than wait for the network.
I have no idea what you mean by that. Apple computers have been the
*easiest* computers to connect to the internet and utilize high speed
communications, interoperate with a variety of other systems, since
1986. They were the first computers to include networking hardware
and software in *every* system, first to include 802.11 antennae and
capability, and first to include gigabit ethernet in a standard
production model,
If what you're talking about is the *ancient* built-in AppleTalk over
twisted pair serial hardware (384kbps HDLC communications,
essentially), well, consider that was available in 1986 when the only
thing available for PCs was serial IO (max 9600bps) or a Novell
Netware solution. And twisted-pair AppleTalk was throttled down to
384Kbps because it was designed to able to interoperate with an Apple
IIgs using a 6502 processor and that was the fastest that the 6502
could move data over the line.
Why do I find this notion so ridiculous? Because in 1986-1988, I
implemented a data system at NASA/JPL to move 100Mbps data across
DECnet connections into the image processing system from data
collection/integration subsystems using a Macintosh II as a control
workstation.
The reason the Syquest media and drive was so popular in the Apple
universe was that Macintosh could handle plug-and-play dynamic
mounting/unmounting of removable hard drive media and was dealing
with large scale image data LONG before anything in the PC universe
was even remotely capable of either.
Godfrey
