Re: GenieLamp editorial

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

Just an observation from the trenches...

I work at a radio station which has eight MS-DOS machines (some IBM
PS/2's, some other stuff), and three Macintoshes.

We suffer *major* system crashes (meaning, the system won't come up, we
lose data, and people start hurling epithets at the station technician/de
facto network administrator) about once a month on the PC's.

In the three years I've worked for the station, we have had that sort of
crash *once* on one of the Macintoshes.  When it happened, we didn't lose
any data, but we did have to reformat the hard drive.  I just grabbed the
external hard drive off of one of the other Macs, used it to boot the dead
computer, archived the data between the two drives, reformatted the bad
hard drive and spooled the data back on to it.  It took about an hour and
a half.  And we traced the problem to a disk encryption program, which has
now been removed from the system.

Is it any wonder that Computer Science people thrust into a microcomputer
environment prefer PC's to Macintoshes?  If everyone switched over to
Macs, the CS people would all be out of work.

That said, there are some specialized applications around the station that
require PC's...notably the capture of newswire data and network
communications via background capture programs.  Sure, it could be done on
the Macs, but the software we have is for the PC's.  And we've discovered
that the only programs that will run reliably under Windows are the
various solitare card games.  So most of the PC stuff is all running under
MS-DOS.

I should also point out that aside from the occasional worn-out keyswitch,
I've never had *any* problems with the three A][e's, one IIgs, and one
Lisa 2/5 I have at home.  It seems that the more "advanced" the computer
system gets, the more likely it is to leave you hanging someplace.

Support "obsolete" technology.  Be true to your ][.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
-- 
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