Re: Apple and the Holy War

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <39105694.C201EF4D@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> I'll let Paul et al look at the quotes below if they wish; my point is
> that below Paul admits that the program that he was citing was a VERY
> special case. 
 
I never "admitted" anything like that -- it's merely your
interpretation of what I wrote.  And I find it amusing that so many
people (yep, you're not alone!) thinks it's a "VERY special case"
to use computers for computations.....  I mean, what else where
they originally created for?
 
> The fact is that in using what most people use a micro computer for
> (productivity that is),
 
You mean word processing and similar trivial stuff?  OK:
 
Writing a letter on a typewriter takes perhaps 2-3 times longer
than writing it on a computer.  If you're really unlucky, and have
tp retype the entire letter, it maybe takes some 10 times longer
on the typewriter than on the computer.  That you call productivity...
 
Computing the stuff on a computer that I did took 20-60 minutes.
Doing the same computations by hand, with no programmable device
available, would easily take weeks.  Which means it's some 300-1000
times faster to do it on the computer.
 
Now, if a performance boost of a factor of 3 to 10 is "productivity",
how come a performance boost of a factor of 300 to 1000 isn't called
"productivity"?  To me, the latter appears enormously more productive
than the former....
 
> an Apple //e is as good as a 1 ghz Wintel. 
>
> Consider this posting which I am doing on my 100 mhz pentium. I could
> log onto my shell account with my //c or //e, and read an post there as
> well, and as fast (except for my DSL) as I am doing with this out of
> date Wintel.
 
I find it amusing that you call a 1 GHz PC "out of date".  Yes it
will be out of date in a year or two, but not yet.  Currently there
aren't much faster x86 hardware available, eh?
 
Yes, you could log into your shell account on your IIc or IIe too,
however you wouldn't have 50+ lines on the screen available, or
a 1000 line scrollback buffer, would you?  Also, the II sucked
regarding type-ahead abilities -- not too surprising on a system
which hardly uses any interrupts at all.
 
Next: try to log on with your 1 GHz peesee using a TCP/IP connection
instead.  Surf the net with a graphical browser, run some nice Java
applets, etc (yep, people often do that with their peesee's
nowadays).  Now try to redo this with your IIe or IIc.... <evil grin>
 
Granted, 1 GHz is definitely "overkill" for these ordinary uses,
most people would do fine with around 30-50 MHz if they weren't
more or less forced to use the current bloatware.  However, you're
going too far when you claim that a 1 Mhz IIc or IIe could do just
as well: that's not quite the case (if it was, why would I have
switched?  I see no point in jut getting the latest stuff - I
want something which works well enough!  I rarely get the latest
stuff, simply because it's significantly cheaper to get what's
not quite the latest stuff).
 
> Word processing??? When writing a paper for grad school, or a letter, or
> a report for presbytery, my Kaypro 2X with it's letter quality printer
> does a better looking job, though the printer is slower, than my laser
> printers driven by my Wintel or my 040 Mac.
 
Did that better looking report help you get a better grade at school?
If not, it was irrelevant.  BTW when grading reports, doesn't content
count much more than appearance?
 
> Or I could use WordPerfect on my //e, or my GS version on my GS and
> my ImageWriter LQ or WP on my Kaypro 16 and my Epson 24 pin dmprinter
> and have great looking stuff without all the overhead of a GUI.
 
Yes, but you would have a hard time exchanging documents with others,
most of whom most likely wouldn't use the same diskette format as you.
 
> The only reason I turned to a GUI, and Wintel for that matter, is I had
> some special needs that only a GUI could do, and the only software at
> that time I could get was on Windows, not the Mac.
 
Which shows another advantage of the mainstream choice: there's so much
software to choose among there.
 
> Otherwise, I was VERY happy with my WordPerfect for DOS office suite,
> and I do miss the solid, sane software that I used to use everyday.
 
So why did you quit using it?  You claimed it worked, and you were
happy with it.  Don't you want to be happy?  Of course you do!  Then
go back to that old software!!!
 
While you were posting that from your 1 GHz "out of date" P-III, I am
posting my response from a 12-year old 16 MHz 80386 (I guess it
nowadays would be called 80386DX, but when I got it there was no
80386SX yet, and therefore there was no need to distinguish the
80386DX either -- therefore it's simply an 80386) with a few Mbytes
of RAM, running plain MS-DOS.  I too log in at a shell account when
uploading this; however to save phone costs I compose the text
offline, using Epsilon.
 
I do have some faster hardware as well (a 66 MHz 486DX, plus a
300 MHz P-II), but I only use these when there's any real need
for that extra power.
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
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