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From: meldal@ithink.Stanford.EDU (Sigurd Meldal)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga mentality
Message-ID: <61@ithink.stanford.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 90 01:42:51 GMT
References: <29Mar1990202523130@BLEKUL11.BITNET>
Sender: meldal@ithink.STANFORD.EDU (Sigurd Meldal)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 78

I shall not enter the fray of comparative computer bashing - to each
his own. But I would like to add some meta comments to the writings of
GHGAQBA@BLEKUL11.BITNET.

He sketches in his impressions of how Amiga users differ negatively
from Mac users. Like a good social sciences student he presents us
with the sample upon which he draws his conclusions:

In article <29Mar1990202523130@BLEKUL11.BITNET> GHGAQBA@BLEKUL11.BITNET writes:
>I know about 10 persons who have an amiga. I bought a mac half a year ago,
>and since i noticed that i hardly ever used my amiga any more, so i sold it .
>I now know about 7 mac-users.

So we have a total of 17 out of a population of hundreds of thousands.
I guess I should have stopped there. but I read on. 

>Let me start off by an example: we had to write a paper for a
>university project, and we always gathered at the place of an amiga user.
>The paper involved mixing graphics and text. Prowrite was considered being too
>slow and having too poor font resolution to print on a 24-pin printer. So the
>amiga user reverted to this: all text was typed in an editor !!!, every
>paragraph was typed on one continuous horizontal line. After that,
>the text was transported to a (very powerful) DTP program, which uses
>vector-fonts for hires printer output.
>Another Amiga user claimed he would use the same procedure for writing
>his thesis.
>
>I think this example gives a pretty good idea of the mentality of an Amiga
>user: unprofessionalism. No PC or Mac user would ever think of using an
>editor for word processing.

Oh dear. You generalize from a sample of 7 to ALL Mac users? From a
sample of 10 to ALL Amiga users? And then dare claim the word
"professionalism" as part of his vocabulary?  The Amiga users of the
example seems very professional, given what was to be done. They
recognized that the word processor did not do a satisfactory job.
Analyzing the situation, they broke the job into two - text entering
and formatting. Using two tools they achieved a superior (presumably?)
result.

Mac people do this all the time. Use an editor (and is that not a word
processor - I split hairs) to enter text, then format/lay it out using a DTP
program. Highly unprofessional??

He then goes on to put down the Amiga, praising the unified
concept of the Macintosh, extolling the virtues of Human Orientedness
(but forgets Apple Pie and Motherhood, tsk, tsk). The one paragraph
that got me going was

>Finally: Amiga users only seem to feel 'good' about their computer if they can
>put another computer down. Mac users don't have this urge, because the don't
>need to. Is it perhaps because Amiga users have a bit of an
>inferiority complex ?

I wonder: What urge made you devote all this typing to putting down
the lowly Amiga user.Or maybe it was all tongue in cheek, and I have
gotten royally pranked-upon....

You're happy with your Mac? Good. So am I. I don't really care to hear
about the stupidity of people liking other machines (nor their views
of me, as a Mac user).

Enough. Enough I said! Begone!!!!

From the desktop of

Sigurd Meldal
-- 

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