Re: An Apple 6502 card in my PC

[sheldon@atlcom.net (Sheldon Simms)]

In article <5dinmd$rlh@login.freenet.columbus.oh.us>,
dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff) wrote:

> Nathan Mates (nathan@visi.com) wrote:
> :
> :    The 8530 makes it sound like an Appletalk board for PCs. Bet it
> : probably has an 8-pin serial port (there was also a 3-pin variant) in
> : it.
> 
> Or slightly more likely (at least in my limited experience with the PC
> AppleTalk board) a 9-pin serial port for an AppleTalk box.  There is one
> floating around my workplace...uh...somewhere...

This thread reminds me of a good example where Apple screwed up for
real: PC/Appletalk connectivity. One small place I used to work had two
Macs and two PCs. It was decided to install a network, mainly for printer
sharing purposes. The first solution proposed was to purchase Appletalk
cards for the PCs and hook them up to the already existing mini-network
of the two Macs plus Laserwriter IINT.

When it was discovered that Appletalk cards for the PCs cost over $300
each, the Macs were tossed, new PCs were bought and a PC network installed.
Of course the final solution cost much more than a couple of Appletalk
cards, but when you have some people looking for any reason to ditch the
"toys" anyway, and Appletalk cards costing 5 times as much as PC ethernet
cards - Well you get the picture...

If the Appletalk cards had been dirt cheap and the company had then relied
on Appletalk for shared printing, it would have been a lot easier to
justify future purchases of Apple hardware.

-Sheldon

Of course this is the same place where the Mac finder was pronounced "cute"
and "Walt-Disney like" by the same guy who, a year later upon having
Win 3.1 installed on his machine pronounced it "modern" and "cool".

-- 
W. Sheldon Simms III   |   2000 is *still* the 20th century
sheldon@atlcom.net     |