Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

["Robert R. Dell" <robertdell@sprintmail.com>]

David wrote:

> > sheercon@earthlink.net wrote:
> >
> > That is rubbish !  Whether I am using Windows 3.x, or 98 or NT, Netscape is
> > the only
> > application on my PC's which I would consider "unstable".  Mind you, I do
> hammer my
> > PC's ......
> >
> > Mike
> >
>
> I agree this is a sensible thing to do....
>
> Whenever I use a PC I am very tempted to hammer it, with a BIG hammer.
>
> And for a lot of good reasons. Not the least of which is it might speed it
> up. In my personal experience a brand new, (and not loaded with everything
> ever written for a PC) 400MHz Presario with 96Mb RAM  is slower in actual
> use (forget benchmarks) than a 120MHz Mac PPC, even in simplest of tasks,
> like opening a window, which takes up to a second.
>
> And my old 266MHz Pentium machine takes longer to open the "My Computer"
> window than my 400MHz B&W G3 Mac does to open Netscape..... this is NOT an
> exaggeration, but a practical, timed, actual, and repeatable situation.

Actually, I brought my 333 MHz G3 into work with it's 21" monitor to do some work.  They asked me why I needed my machine (and such a huge "TV" in front of me) and I showed them.  I showed proportional printing (print at 50% size or whatever) onto paper (which the PCs don't have), I showed them the software I have that they would NEVER buy at work,  I showed them all the editing capabilities and how easy they are and got "You can do that on the PC" so I told them "Show me" and they couldn't.  They had a 450 MHz machine with Windows 98 on it and we tested times to run MSIE and load a web page from the net (shared internet VIA WebRamp TM) and the Mac had the pages up much faster than the PC did.  We tested opening Microsoft Office documents and the Mac surpassed yet again.

We checked configurations and well, they were slightly skewed in the Mac's favor.  96 MB RAM on the PC, 256 MB on the Mac.  IDE drive on the PC, SCSI2 drive on the Mac.   512k level 1 cache on the PC, 2MB on the Mac.  Windows 98 on the PC, Mac OS 8.6 on the Mac.

All totalled, we agreed that for what I use the Mac for, it's best for me and for what they use PCs for at work, it's best for them to use that but they might get a Mac for a server instead of Windows NT because of the speed but might not  because of the price.

Think what you may.  This is supposed to be an Apple // group not a Mac or PC flame group...

By the way, anybody have an old Apple // reference manual? I need to know what the names of all the control characters are and what they are meant for (in that manual).

Robert R. Dell