Re: PC or Mac?

[Greg Weston <gwestonREMOVE@CAPSattbi.com>]

In article <a3dk33$1ln$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter
<pausch@saaf.se> wrote:

> > The Macintosh Plus offered external expansion capabilities.  And SCSI
> > has some advantages over IDE (namely the number and variety of devices
> > which can be attached to a single bus).
>  
> I'm well aware of the advantage of SCSI, thank you, but the major
> advantage of IDE is low price, which matters in a mass market.  And
> even if SCSI is better, IDE is still good enough for most users.
> SCSI is really needed only on servers and other machines having a
> heavy load of disk activity.

You'd be surprised. I worked it out 2 years ago and discovered that -
given my salary (which is fairly average in the tech sector) - the time
savings realized from SCSI over IDE in my desktop machine would pay for
the cost differential over the course of a year. And, of course, it
would be in service for well over a single year.

> > Apple never really switched over to PC format floppies.  All floppies
> > are formatted with the Macintosh filesystem by default, but we can
> > read PC floppies.
>  
> Then how come I can read, on PC's, the floppies created on my wife's
> Mac?  (she has a Powerbook).  Those diskettes contain resource forks
> and the like (as hidden files), but I can access all those files
> without problem - and I'm not using any kind of special software - it
> works fine right on my 14-year old PC.  If that Mac isn't using the
> PC format on diskettes, how come I can do this?

The Mac will happily write to FAT disks with essentially no warning to
the user. If she used floppies that came formatted for PCs and never
reformatted them as HFS disks, you would experience exactly what you
describe.

G