Henning <Germany.EU.net!dtmgmbh.uucp!riebe> writes:
> A practical question comes to mind: seems like there's several programs
> developed for the Mac; is this the accepted platform for these apps?
> Are Macs _widely_ available, eg. in schools, etc.? Multimedia platforms
> are becoming very affordable/widespread in the PC world. Will there be
> a swing to the PC environment for these types of applications?
>
> H. Henning Riebe
> email: riebe%DTMGmbH@Germany.EU.net
Well, ebing in the computer field for far too long, I'd have to say yes
on all counts. MAC is the preferred platform for education, mainly
because of its ease of use. But in my experience, PC's are used to
develop the programs, and then transferred over to MAC system 7 format.
MACs have a lot of hardware problems, and have a problem "locking up"
because of the lack of memory management software. This is where PCs
thrive. PCs are much better in the areas of multi-tasking and multi-media
simply because it manages it's memory well.
Ask any MAC owner what happens when he runs multi-tasking and
multi-media...he has to reboot several times a day. I would never try
running autocad on a MAC.
Programming is much easier on a PC, and that is what I am involved with
now in creating language programs. If I want to see it on a MAC, I have a
program that can convert the format. But MACs are MUCH better on an
educational platform. They are also cheap in that area too.
Windows was supposed to be the answer to PC vs. MAC. But Windows was
stolen from MAC, and it is much more complicated for school age kids to use.
Dave
[ And, for whatever it's worth, Apple took their point-and-click
user-interface from the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox. Douglas
Englebart of PARC is generally credited with the development of the
mouse (I saw him demonstrating his user interface, which was very
much like what was later used in Apple's Lisa and Macintosh products
and which Xerox later developed and implemented in a product called the
"Star") at the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
--Gary ]