I get such a kick out of some of the commercials on TV that Apple has produced telling us all how much better their young, hip, Macintosh systems are than our stodgy, middle aged, PCs. Having worked in the computer industry for a number of years now, I've worked on stuff that most computer geeks today have never even heard of... how many of you replaced PDP-11 systems with VAXes?
Here's a little history if you're interested.
Anyway... my first hands on experience with computers was with the early Apple computers, and I enjoyed them immensely. My first PC experience was very frustrating, primarily because there wasn't anybody around to ask for help when I got stuck. But as I figured things out I discovered I could do a whole lot more on that PC then I ever could on the Apples I had played with. Of course the PC was several years further along.
In 1996 I started up my ISP, and of course supported all sorts of systems. I found in most cases the folks that had MACs were not nearly as capable when it came time to setup their system to access the internet. I believe this was about OS 7.6 at this time, and as with Windows, it has gotten easier!
I took a job in 1998 at a facility that had about 50 MAC systems for their administrative purposes, another 20-30 Unix systems for software development, a couple dozen VAX VMS systems for actual data processing, and 3 or 4 PCs sitting around for special purposes that couldn't be achieved on any of the other systems. While all these systems were connected to the same physical network, none of them talked to each other, or shared resources... each platform had it's own server! The printer room had a laser printer and color ink jet for each platform, as well as 2 large format printers.
All of this drove me crazy since it was such a waste! If a document was prepared by one of the software developers on a Sun, then they couldn't send a copy to the program manager since he had a MAC. So I setup a Windows NT 4 server with services for MAC and Unix installed on it just as a proof of concept. I wanted to show these folks what they could accomplish if all the platforms could share the same resources and exchange information.
It's funny really that the results of my proof of concept led to the complete replacement of all MAC computers (save a few in a room by themselves) with PCs. The Unix, VMS systems, and PCs all shared the same 3 printers. 1 laser, 1 color ink jet, and 1 large format... all served by that NT server. Not only that, but I could write a document on my PC, then drop it in a shared folder on the server... and Joe in software could then open that document to read or edit it on his Sun! Amazing!
The most entertaining part of this for me was watching the frustration of our "MAC Expert" as more and more of the 250 or so users we supported started coming to me to get things done on the PC that they weren't able to do on their MAC!
Here's an entertaining video about how easy MACs can be to use.
