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From: mazlack@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Lawrence J. Mazlack)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: medical uses of a MAC
Message-ID: <15269@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 15-Aug-86 01:15:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.15269
Posted: Fri Aug 15 01:15:10 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Aug-86 06:44:03 EDT
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Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: mazlack@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Lawrence J. Mazlack)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 37
Keywords: Delphi

>> From: PUGDOG (11554)
>> Subject: Medical Uses of a MAC
>>  
>> BUT, lately, due to availability at work, I have been playing with the MAC
>> a little, and realize it does have some nice features.  I am still not
>> convinced it is a legitimate machine for anything but graphics, ESPECIALLY
>> FOR USE IN MEDICINE -- I AM NOT CONVINCED!
>>  
>> In fact, no one has been able to convince me.  I haven't found one legitimate
>> application -- enven "manufacturers" of "rumored" products have not sent
>> the information they have promised.
>
>Mac memory run's without parity and certain ESD events, AC line faults, and
>other powersupply problems can leave bits corrupted in memory without detection
>Furthermore the error detection on Mac floppies is very poor.
>
>Using computers without parity protection in critical medical service is a
>timebomb -- the resulting missinformation may kill someone.
>
>I would say than any use of a mac to maintain charts, medication, or provide
>advisory AI services should be avoided ... use an IBM computer or some
>UNIX machine with parity memory and much better disk channel error detection.
>
>Non-parity machines make nice toys, but I hope they stay out of medicine and
>other critical applications (fire, police, military, CIA, FBI, etc) where
>peoples lives are at stake.

Actually, I don't think that this is such a big problem.  BUT, I do think
that weak product support and short product lifetime makes it a tough
choice because just about the time that you have developed an application,
the machine and it's interfaces changes -- and there you are, having 
dropped serious resources into a machine that is poorly supported (because
it is "obsolete") and requires significant hassle to integrate with
new equipment. Macs are real nice for technology mavens and short term
word processing, but are probably a marginal call for an application where
the cost of the computer is not important in comparison to the cost of the
information that has been gathered.