Re: Re. Sun-Apple

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

At my other workplace, we had the 486/66 minitower running open the other
day (remember when it was not uncommon to run a ][+ or ][e with the lid
off and the drives stacked aside, monitor straddling the gaping hole in
the top of the case, to make it easy to get boards in and out?  And to
think a local computer columnist thought the IBM PS/2 was a great
innovation with only two thumbscrews holding the case together...)

And I was noticing the temperature of the CPU, mounted in this cheap
machine with neither heat-sink nor fan.  I've long bemoaned the fact that
the station doesn't have a range-top in the kitchenette, but now if I get
the urge to fry something small, I'll just open up the computer and use
the CPU. Wow!  No wonder a friend of a previous poster was having troubles
with an overheating CPU and a $95 repair bill.

That aside, I am the de-facto computer administrator for a radio station. 
The computers there include:

1 Macintosh SE, in GM's office
1 Macintosh IIsi, in Public Information office
1 Macintosh Plus, in Engineering office
2 IBM PS/2-50's, in PD's office and Master Control
an assortment of nine additional PC's, mostly 80386 machines
1 80486 based automation computer running OS/2

In the three and a half years I've been working for the station, all of
these computers run pretty much 24/7.  At least one of the Intel-based
machines breaks down each week, generally with a serious failure...dead
monitors, dead video cards, dead HD controllers, dead serial ports, dead
hard drives, trashed system software, and so on.  The only exception so
far has been the OS/2 computer (knock-on-wood), but it has its own special
brand of failure.  For the most part, we're not running Windows...when we
do, we have even more trouble.  One machine had an HD controller on a
multi-IO card go out (one of those boards with two serial ports, a
parallel port, a game port, and an IDE controller), so we replaced the I/O
board, then the serial ports went out on the new board.  So now there is
one machine with two multi-IO boards just to have full function.

Meanwhile, each of the Macs has failed exactly *once* in that time.  Both
of the first two failures were caused by a disk-encryption package that
crashed...since removing that program (DiskLock...I don't recommend it.),
those two machines have performed flawlessly.  The only Mac to suffer a
hardware failure is the Mac Plus, which has just in the past week decided
not to power up.

Then there is my ][gs at home.  It stays on 24/7 as well, and as long as
I'm not using HyperCard, it almost never crashes.  Okay, I did suffer a
trashed directory last week, but I was able to make a 100% recovery.

My experience says that if you want a computer that works, in the long
run, the Apples are a lot cheaper than the PC's.  Just in the tech support
costs.  From practically Day One, Apples have been plug-N-play, all the
way back to the original Apple ][.  So far, the PCs haven't even come
close.  Strange when you consider that the Apple ][ pre-dates the PC by
about four years, isn't it?!

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
-- 
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