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From: jimb@ism780
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Buying: PC vs. the Mac
Message-ID: <1799934392@ism780>
Date: Mon, 28-Apr-86 23:41:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780.1799934392
Posted: Mon Apr 28 23:41:00 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 14-May-86 19:24:43 EDT
Lines: 50



I just finished reading a string of postings debating the merits of IBM PC
vs. Mac and why anyone would *buy* a PC.

We're a two-computer household -- I have an XT and my wife as a 512K Mac.
Neither one of us are hacker-folk, though in the dark days of IBM 1620 and
IBM 7090 I did some programming as an engineering aide.

One thing the debate in the postings seemed to overlook was applications.
Ten-second pause for all macho hackers to barf.
***********

At the time I bought my XT (one year ago) and even now, it was absolutely the
correct choice for someone with my profile of usage.  Writing.  LOTS of
writing.  The need for letter quality printing, REAL letter quality, not all
this "near" letter quality crap that's insufficient for the standards of many
editors; a printer with a cut-sheet feeder to handle letterhead and
envelopes -- the issue of envelopes skewering laserprinters; and a
professional, heavy-duty word-processing program.

By my standards, the WP program needs to be something like Word Perfect or
Multimate.  Microsoft Word is an abomination that's not much better than
Wordstar; MacWrite is fine for writing Aunt Hepzibah or tooling out a term
paper, but that's about it.

Finally, Word Perfect is supposed to be coming out on the Mac at the end of
the year.  There are some kludges that now allow the Mac to use a NEC
printer, though I don't know about nuances such as cut-sheet feeder codes.
(Anyone out there have any experience?)

Only with the good WP program and access to a quality printer will the Mac
become a reasonable option for users like me, and the market for users far
outnumbers the market for hackers.

I think the old automobile metaphor is in order.  More power to those of you
who enjoy tinkering with your machines to get every last % of performance.
There's simply a much larger body of people who simply want to get from A to
B to C, who are more concerned with accomplishing task than concerned with
process.  I mean, I don't care that my car has automatic transmission and
doesn't have fuel-injection or overhead cams; it gets me where I want to go,
does 70 m.p.h. easily, and is comfortable and has decent repair and service
support.  Just about everything else is irrelevant.  (Please, no nits.  This
is a metaphor, not photocomparison.)

			-- from the musings of Jim Brunet

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