I ran my business on an old Quadra (It wasn't old at the time).
Switched to a PC when my hardware would only go as far as OS 7.2.
What a mistake that was.
Hey Rich, you're tongue's usually so well planted in your cheek
that I genuinely need to ask what you intended by "mistake" ;-)
So was your mistake the switch to Wintel, or the original Quadra
acquisition?
I've been burned by both camps in various ways, and I've always
been ready to give plenty of stick to each as well as praise where
it's due. Mine was (still is, actually) a Quadra 840AV, one of two
identical systems (with a colleague) acquired on Christmas Eve 1993
for a defence dept. tech editing project of which they did a
marvellous job and gave us a marked advantage over a very large
contractor doing complementary work.
We selected the 840AV after much chewing of nails over whether it
would be better to wait a couple of months for the PowerMac. But we
went with the personal assurance (at a rather swank seminar) of one
of the top Apple people in Australia that it would be fully
upgradable. So guess which was the
only model from that era of
Quadras that in the end turned out to be not upgradable?
Grrrrrr........!!!
On the productivity side, I recall feeding a 1.5 MB Quark file on
it, with over 250 MB of linked photographs, into a LaserWriterII
that had all of 2 MB of installed RAM. An hour or so later there
was the job, with no fuss at all.
By contrast, one of my early encounters with Windows (3.1) needed
me to routinely print an 11-page spreadsheet (of about 450 kB) on a
LaserJet III, also with 2 MB of on-board RAM. It choked completely,
requiring the print job to always be split in two. And that's not
to mention that greater curiosity of the day known as "page
protection"! ;-)
If there was ever a word that encapsulated the Mac
system
advantage, right from the beginning, that word has to be "seamless".
Cheers,
Mike
Melbourne
