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From: goer@sphinx.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Apple/ the look and feel of toys
Message-ID: <1171@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Feb-87 15:35:03 EST
Article-I.D.: sphinx.1171
Posted: Tue Feb 24 15:35:03 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Feb-87 06:37:07 EST
References: <677@imsvax.UUCP> <294@sdics.ucsd.EDU>
Reply-To: goer@sphinx.UUCP (Richard L. Goerwitz III)
Distribution: world
Organization: U Chicago Computation Center
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Xref: utgpu comp.sys.ibm.pc:1930 comp.sys.mac:1471
Summary: enough "my machine's better than yours"


     Isn't it about time we stopped carrying on like second graders, saying,
"My machine's better than yours."  Neither Apple nor IBM is an ideal outfit to
work with.  Apple spends its idle hours suing the competition, instead of
simply making better, cheaper products.  IBM sits around playing market-
ing games, and giving people the old line about not being able to get
clones fixed five years from now (Who's going to be using a PC five years
from now?  What technician can't service, by and large, any compatible?
Even if a clone fails, you can buy two or three of them for the cost of a
single IBM!).

     The Mac and the PC/AT each have advantages.  With MS-DOS you get an oper-
ating system that's not going to die soon, tremendous variety in software,
relative ease of development, etc.  With the Mac you get incredible flex-
ibility in the video display, and the ability to interface this display
with a printer in a very elegant fashion.  To die-hard MS-DOS fanatics, this
is going to sound like a cute, though largely wasteful, use of the CPU.  But
look - have you ever tried to, say, display Hebrew, English, and Greek to-
gether on a PC?  With an EGA it can be done.  But then you have to worry about
printing it.  And all the while, you have the tremendous overhead of getting
the machine to do something its designers provided no support for.  (Iron-
ically, because Mac software is not so prevalent as MS-DOS software, programs
which do multilingual word-processing with mixed right-left left-right lang-
uages [without screwing up wordwrap, etc.] are actually more readily found
among MS-DOS machines.  In fact, I don't believe any full-featured academic
word-processor that does this is available on the Mac, while MS-DOS has two.)
There are many other examples of advantages the Mac's user interface pro-
vides.  This is just one.
    
     The bottom line is that points are scored by both machines.  On the
other hand, each has distinct deficits - many of which are occasioned by
the attitude of its manufacturers/designers rather than by any intrinsic
deficiencies.  I think everyone would agree that each of the two outfits
could take a page out of the other's book.  IBM could create a much
more flexible video interface.  Apple could adopt an open-information
policy, and, in effect, open up the box.  Why not approach this whole matter
in a more even-handed manner, avoiding those silly, often quite uninformed
sorts of value-judgments which have marred much of the discussion?

                                             --Richard