![[MacOS 8.1]](PICS/MacOS8a.gif)
Introduction
Don't get me wrong. I am NOT a computer illiterate person
and I have no fear of technology. In fact, I used to work for a small
shop assembling PC clones and I can still remember some tricks
for setting jumpers on a motherboard. I know a half dozen programming
languages and have used all kinds of computers (more on that later).
I've done professional software development and support, Web publishing
and even some system administration. Lets face it - I am a geek :)
It seems like I've tried it all. I started on an Atari
800XL with 64 K of memory and built-in BASIC interpreter. I
even wrote a couple of games for it (a Tetris and a
Snake). Later on I have used IBM Mainframe computers,
VAX terminals, MSX's and Apple II's. That was in
the stone age of computing.
Run DOS run ... please ...
Then I got into that whole IBM PC thing. I have struggled with
MS-DOS versions 3.3, 5.0, 6.0 and
6.22 just like all those millions of people. I used to know
everything about memory allocation and how to configure extended and
expanded memory. I even found some very creative ways to assign those
8 character names so I could remember what they meant a week
later. The simplistic text-based interface was very limited, but
combined with such excellent tools as Norton Commander plus with
all the cool games written for it, DOS wasn't that bad.
I also used to have Windows 3.1 and at the time it was marketed
as a God-given state-of-the-art ultra fast and super efficient
multitasking environment. In reality it was ugly, hard to
use and inconsistent. Half the time I had to spend just
trying to make it run. It crashed way too often. Worst of all, it had
those pathetic folders that couldn't even contain other folders.
But then again, Norton Desktop and Starfish Dashboard were
the saving grace for those of us who dared to differ.
At that time I was very proud of my "high-end" 66 MHz 486-DX2 based
computer with VESA local bus, a "huge" 420 Meg hard drive and
"whopping" 8 Megs of RAM. Over the years I added a modem, a sound card,
a CD-ROM drive and a memory upgrade. And as strange as it sounds,
spending two days installing device drivers and solving hardware
conflicts between my SoundBlaster and the CD-ROM drive is still
one of my most treasured memories!
Eventually I discovered IBM OS/2 and fell in love with it. First
and foremost, I could actually change folder icons ... and window
backgrounds ... and cursors ... and various other stuff. I could also
run tons of programs at the same time without getting those annoying
Out of Memory messages. That was the first time I've heard of
multi-threading, memory protection and object oriented
interface design. Those were precisely the things that
Microsoft tried to implement into Windows 95 years later.
I have followed the life story of OS/2 from fairly slow version
2.0 to much improved 2.1 to absolutely incredible
multimedia oriented 3.0 Warp. I never upgraded to version
4.0 for a variety of reasons, primarily because my PC was
way to slow for it. Over the years, OS/2 have evolved into a
wonderful, polished and stable operating systems
with such features as integrated voice navigation and dictation, native
Java support and intelligent adaptive help system (if you pray
hard enough maybe Windows 2010 will have all that!). If not for
bone headed IBM marketing OS/2 Warp could have been
the industry standard. It's a fine product nowadays but who cares?
Besides, OS/2 still shares a lot of the same problems that
Windows has. Especially in the earlier versions, it had some
serious interface flaws. Hardware recognition and support are still
very limited. And sadly, finding good applications for OS/2 is
becoming increasingly difficult, to the point when IBM owned
Lotus doesn't deliver its software for OS/2 for over a year
after the Windows version becomes available. To make matters
worse, IBM wouldn't even sell you a computer with OS/2
Warp preinstalled, but rather labels all their boxes as Designed
for Windows 95/NT. OS/2 is basically dead now. And I am
moving on.
Windows 95
So much ink and bandwidth have been wasted on this subject that I dare
not to devour much of your time talking about the most overhyped
product in computer history (and, arguably, the biggest
disappointment of all time). Instead, I will invite you to read an
article called
Beyond the Hype by Douglas Adams (the author of The Hitchhikers
Guide to the Galaxy) published in The Guardian on August 25,
1995. Enjoy!
I only have a minor point to add to that. It took IBM no less
than 4 major revisions of OS/2 to get it right for the
most part. Apple have used the 14 years of experience
with Macintosh to improve upon what was already a good thing in
1984 and the current revision of MacOS is version 8.1.
UNIX have existed for decades and still people find room
for improvement. On the contrary, Windows 95 is basically a new
operating system all together (for it is vastly different from
Windows 3.1) and any product in version 1.0, especially
something as complex as a modern operating system, cannot possibly be
even close to perfect. To make the matters worse, Microsoft is
known to care more about sales volumes than quality of their software.
If you still expect Windows 95 to be as solid and polished as any
of the above mentioned operating systems, you might be fooling yourself.
Enough said.
UNIX rules! ... but so what?
Naturally, after years of using a PC and while being a graduate
student at the University of Illinois,
a school known for its Computer Science program and UNIX
orientation, I couldn't help but wonder if I should become a UNIX
person (that is a 100% geek) after all. Over the years, I have had access
to Silicon Graphics, IBM and HP workstations, dial-up
accounts on AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and Digital UNIX.
I have done some fairly advanced scientific programming in Fortran
and have come to love the vi editor and pine e-mail
program. So, I thought I should try installing Linux at home.
I got Slackware 3.1 distribution and a couple of good UNIX
books. Then I spent a few sleepless nights repartitioning my
hard drive and installing Linux on my PC. With luck and
help from some nice (but very arrogant) people from the Linux
newsgroups I got it up and running! For the first time ever I had
root access privileges, and that was an experience in itself. It
made me feel like the King of the World and the Master of the Entire
Universe (so, now I understand why system administrators look down on us
mere mortals).
I could now change the shell parameters all I wanted and I could give
myself a dozen accounts with different access privileges. After I have
done enough fooling around, I started wondering what else was
Linux good for? I posted on the newsgroups again asking this
very question. So, people told me that I could set up a Web server or
do some serious software development. The former wasn't such a good
idea over a 14.4 Kbps modem and, as for the latter, umm ... why would I
take my work home?
Yes, UNIX provides extreme power and has tons of great
system utilities but it still lacks even basic productivity
applications. The Command Line Interface (CLI) interface
is, to put it mildly, antique. I admit, generally there are some
advantages to a good CLI, such as flexibility, low hardware
requirements and stability. But, Come on People, UNIX was
developed at AT&T before I was even born and it still looks
almost the same as then. For one thing, the learning curve is 10 times
that of the worst Graphical User Interface (GUI). Yes,
there were attempts at creating GUI's for UNIX, such as
X Windows, but why do you still have to manually configure every
single detail before you can use it? That simply misses the whole idea
of the point-and-click nature of a GUI.
I have a theory though. UNIX is maintained by people who like to
create problems for themselves and then solve them. To them it's like a
game. But what's more important, they have convinced the World that
they should be paid a lot of money for playing their game. Then they
have proceeded to develop a variety of mostly incompatible standards,
just to make playing their game more fun. And ever since it became a
matter of their job security to maintain the status quo. Just a crazy
thought, of course :)
Back to my story. Needless to say I wasn't paid for playing that game
and, honestly, I got tired of dealing with hundreds of configuration
files. I had Linux just sitting on my PC for about a
year, up until the time when I reformatted my hard drive and gave the
computer to my parents. At that point, I have concluded that even
though I liked UNIX, it would never become my primary computing
platform.
Then a miracle happened. I got a chance to use a totally different
kind of machine. It was an 8 year old Macintosh IIfx that I
"inherited" when I started my research assistantship work at the
University of Illinois. While it was painfully slow at times, it
was such a pleasure to use that it forever changed the way I look
at personal computing. And, as the story goes, after two weeks I was
ready to swear that as long as Apple is alive I will use their
products and their products only.
Now get this, the machine mentioned above survived from the time when
286-based computers were still commonplace and it still runs most
of the modern software. No wonder Apple isn't doing that well
these days - their computers seem to last 3 times longer than
Intel-based PC's, and few people feel the need to upgrade them
every couple of years, like IBM-compatibles.
In addition to that, Apple consistently has the highest overall
reliability and best rated support of any major personal computer
manufacturer (even PC Magazine will tell you so!). What that
means is that they not only don't get much money from hardware repairs,
but their support costs are the highest in the industry. Once again -
it's a wonder a company like Apple, who just happens to care
about their customers, is still in business!
A few Mac advantages
Aside from their unrivaled longevity, reliability and
support, what's so great about Macintosh computers? Well,
the first thing that comes to mind is seamless hardware and software
integration. Plug it in and click a button. Never seems to
fail. It's just the kind of magic that Microsoft promised with
Plug-and-Play but never fully realized.
The MacOS interface is also intuitive and I'll just give
you one simple example to demonstrate what I mean by that. To quit a
program on a Macintosh you press Command-Q or else
Command-W to close a window. To exit a program in Windows
you have to remember to use Alt-F4. Which one, do you think,
makes more sense?
Then there is drag-and-drop. I mean real
drag-and-drop. Want to install an application? Drag a
folder to your hard drive. Want to add a new Control Panel, a
couple of system enhancements (referred to as Extensions) and a
few new fonts? No problem. Just drag them to the System Folder
and MacOS will put them all where they belong. Want to remove
any of the above? Just drag them to Trash. It's that simple!
It's hard to believe that there is no need to manually edit
AUTOEXEC.BAT and the numerous *.INI files. Better yet,
you don't have to learn how to deal with the Registry. A
Mac will maintain an applications database for you. It just
works.
By the way, MacOS also knows exactly where each file came from
and writes information about the creator inside the file, so you don't
need those stupid file extensions. And yes, long file names - they were
there for as long as Macintosh has existed!
I could talk about ease of use for hours. But, instead, let me
refer you to a real life example. My roommate is a CS major with over 5
years of experience with PC compatibles and some system administration
background. Recently he bought a new Windows 95 laptop and it
took him no less than two months to figure out how to setup a
parallel port connection with his old desktop computer. Now, let me get
it straight, I have only used Macs for less than two years and I
am not even a CS major. Nevertheless, when a friend of mine brought her
Apple PowerBook for me to show her a few tricks on how to use it,
it took me less than 20 minutes to setup an AppleTalk
network connection with my computer. What's even more amazing, another
friend of mine, who is a long time Mac user, was really surprised
that it took me "that long!"
There is also that backwards compatibility issue that PC
users dread more than anything else. But not me. On my new
PowerPC I can still play all those games written in late 80's (of
course, I don't - there are thousands of new games, but just to prove a
point :) And yes, even though Apple has undergone a complete
change from the 68000 series processor architecture to
PowerPC (a kind of transition that Intel plans to do
sometime in 1999), the operating system was written in such a way that
every legacy application that I am aware of still runs on newer
computers. And, let me tell you, the 68K processor emulation is
nothing short of amazing!
Like I have already noted, MacOS is a mature operating
system. What do you think was the biggest complain of the customers
that bought the system upgrade version 8.0 last summer? You
know, the one that introduced an all-new platinum appearance and
spring-loaded folders, among other things. It was the fact that
the "zero" in the default system font now has a line crossing it, so
from a distance it might resemble the number "eight." Have you ever
heard a Windows (or any other) user complain about a peculiarity
of the system font? Probably not, because they are more concerned with
just making their systems work properly.
While I am at it, lets talk about default settings, such as, say,
fonts. Once I have tried to select the best font for the pop-up menus
in MacOS. After wasting half an hour and going through dozens of
choices I have selected two that I liked the most - "Chicago," the
MacOS 8.X default font, and "Charcoal," the MacOS 7.X
default. I guess interface designers at Apple have worked
overtime to find just the right font for the job. That is exactly why
with the same size monitor on a Mac I can select a higher
graphics resolution than I can with Windows and still be able to
read the screen without straining my eyes that much.
All in all, Macintoshes are just better designed computers inside
out. For example, unlike the "award-winning" Dell machines, one
of which we got at work not so long ago, Macs come with decent
keyboards, that also match the color of their CPU boxes. Dell
Computer might be a Fortune 500 corporation, but why do their
PC's still look as if they were put together in the same dorm
room where Michael Dell started his company?
So, you might ask - are Macintoshes perfect? No, just like any
other computers they can crash and occasionally the hardware can fail.
Sometimes you even need to do a little troubleshooting exercise.
Nothing like trying to figure out if two devices are using the same
IRQ, you know. But, here are a few real life examples again:
"Apples" to Oranges ...
These days you often hear that, although Macintosh was ahead of
its time when it came out, Intel-based machines have already
caught up. This is a myth.
Let's look at a Windows user's wish list. Michael Miller,
the editor-in-chief of PC Magazine
while writing about the Windows 98 beta wishes that it would
do the following - "I'd like to take all of my Windows settings
(such as icon positions, backgrounds, and screen-saver settings) and back
them up on a floppy disk in a simple manner. Then I want to install that
disk on a new machine and apply my settings. It would be even better if
this also worked for my applications". Well, Microsoft is not
planning on granting his wish so he can just dream on... But, believe
it or not, that's exactly what I did when I got my new PowerPC.
On a Mac there is a file called Finder preferences that
contains exactly the information he is looking for. Similarly, every
application has its own Preferences file which can be easily
copied to another machine.
But things are not that bad for Windows devotees. This is how
Windows Sources magazine
describes a Windows 98 feature that Mac users have been
taking for granted since the beginning of time - "[Desktop Update] gives
you a more accurate file-copy progress bar, which finally shows the
progress of the entire group of files you're copying, not just of each
one". Windows users, rejoice!
Then there is that "new" development that my roommate is all excited
about called Universal Serial Bus (USB). He likes the
idea that he would be able to get a monitor that has a variety of
multimedia inputs and outputs and he wouldn't have to reach all those
ports on the back of the tower case under his desk. So, I showed him my
5 year old Apple monitor that has two keyboard/mouse
inputs, a microphone input and a speaker output. Hey, maybe in another
5 years PC's will have a power button on the keyboard!
Here is another curious comment from
PC Computing magazine'sHall of Shame - "Almost everyone's made
the mistake of pushing the Reset button instead of the floppy-eject button.
Sure, you should've been looking, but we'd rather blame the idiot who came
up with this fatal design flaw." Well, not on a Mac. For one
thing, there is no eject button to start with because the floppy
ejects automatically. Neither do you need to use those archaic letter
associations like A: or C: for your drives. Finally,
Macintosh knows whether there is a disk in the drive and never
gives you a Disk not found message.
This quote from CNET's editor Sue
Plumley sums up how a lot of people feel about Windows 95 - "Some
days, it's hard to remember why we use PCs. Some days, it seems
the major design goal of Windows 95 is to drive us crazy." That's
why CNET kindly wrote a Making Windows 95 work online guide.
Unfortunately, they could not fix what Microsoft broke. For
instance, when answering a popular question - "Is there a way to cancel
a command?" CNET experts just wished - "If only there were.
Unlike the Macintosh operating system, Windows 95 provides
no keyboard shortcuts to stop a program from opening after you have
double-clicked the icon, no matter how long it takes to launch." Oh,
well...
Just when I though that I've collected enough evidence on Windows
95, I happened to read the March '98 issue of
PC World. This is what a magazine that is traditionally a
Microsoft-friendly publication had to say on the subject -
"Despite the rosy promises (and many service releases, bug fixes, and
updates), many "features" in Windows 95 still leave us gritting
our teeth and reaching for a bottle of aspirin (or scotch). These
aren't necessarily catastrophes that will wipe out your data, just
everyday glitches that annoy and irritate - enough to make you want
to stick pins in your Bill Gates doll." They readily provide a list
of those "everyday glitches" and, not surprisingly, it is anything but
short. Below are a few notable items from their colossal list of
Windows 95 greatest failures:
What does the future hold?
Life goes on. While some of the most promising computer technologies
vanish into oblivion, new ones appear to take their place and fill the
void. Below are a couple of operating system related examples.
Special Thanks
I would like to express my deepest thanks to
Alex Warshavsky, Nancy Fosdick and Chelsea Oller for their helpful
suggestions. I am also grateful to Igor Matlin,
Mateus Andrade and Mark Stein whose insightful Microsoft advocacy
inspired me to put my own thoughts in perspective and write this article.
* Disclaimer: I speak from my own experience,
however incomplete and biased.
Copyright © 1998 KSI![[OS/2 Warp]](PICS/OS2Warp.jpg)
"Better DOS than DOS"
"Better Windows than Windows"
(In their own words)
I think you get the point. Macintosh is still light years ahead
of its time. And while Microsoft is desperately copying what
Apple users have enjoyed for years, MacOS is steadily
improving. In fact, since Windows 95 was released, Apple
have given us MacOS 7.6, 8.0 and 8.1. All I can
say is - good luck catching up, Mr. Gates!
After all, Microsoft is not gonna be the king of the hill
forever. At least I hope not.![[Made with Macintosh]](PICS/MadeWithMac.jpg)
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