Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <slrna58vha.2u.byron@b60z27hbb464i.ab.hsia.telus.net>,
Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill <byron@b60z27hbb464i.ab.hsia.telus.net> wrote:
 
> Even if the entertainment markets (music, television, etc.) are
> driven by upgrades, you can still use twenty year old televisions
> and radios to access modern entertainment.
 
But for how long?  Digital television is approaching, and here in
Sweden the goal now is to close down the old analog television
network around 2007 - this will make all current TV sets obsolete
unless you buy a special "digital box" to them - and you need one
"box" for each TV set.  Yes, we're early compared to most other
countries, and the actual "analog turnoff" date may come later - but
the transition will come, making a lot of TV sets unusable.
 
And the situation was similar during the switchover from AM to FM
radio braodcasting, although the time period of parallell broadcasts
were here much longer: our first FM radio stations were put in use
around 1957, and the AM radio stations didn't close down until the
1980's.  Nowadays the AM band is dead - except at night, when foreign
AM transmissions can be heard.  Likewise the only AM radio
transmissions here today are those aimed abroad.
 
> Even CDs have been around for well over a decade, without forced
> upgrades to your CD player.  This is not the forced upgrade cycle
> of the computer industry.
 
Remember when the CD was introduced, and the switchover from vinyl
records?  And suppose you want to get an "old" record player with can
play 78 rpm records - how easily is such a thing found?
 
>> It's much harder to base the continued existence of a market on
>> a continuous series of breakthroughs than on continuous evolutionary
>> improvement.
> 
> Okay, so maybe I am being unrealistic in a couple of respects.  Yet I
> am still going to insist that backwards compatibility should be the
> norm.  If there is a compelling reason for people to upgrade, people
> will.  If somebody does not have a compelling reason to upgrade, then
> they are not left with an all-or-nothing option.
 
Here radio and TV is a good example: color TV was implemented such
that black-and-white TV sets still could be used to view the
programs.  And stereo radio could be heard on older monophonic radio
receivers.
 
> We all know that the Apple II can go online.  The IIgs can do it in
> a fancy way, while the 8 bit machines are limited to shell accounts.
> If you are only interested in communicating textual information,
> this should be okay.
 
If you add a file transfer protocol to your shell account, then you
can transfer binary information as well throuh the shell account.  I
do that from time to time.
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se
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