[PLUG] Mac Cost

[Robert Munro]

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On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:24:00 -0800 Russell Johnson wrote:
<snip>
> Part of my requirements for my laptop is that 'it just works'. If
> I have to futz with it, ever, then I'm not doing my job nor my
> boss any good. OS/X gives me that more than any other OS ever has.
> Yes, there was a learning curve, but now that the learning curve
> is mostly over, I'm more productive, and have fewer issues than
> either Windows or Linux gave me.

That's important. I'll tell you a story, because history deserves to
be told. But then history is old news, so stop reading if you do not care.

Just less than 25 years ago I drove to Southern California, with one
of those Compaq 'portable' PCs in the back of my Mazda RX7, headed
down to Orange County to replace its property tax system, due to
Proposition 13.

I was an IBM mainframe systems programmer at the time, a member of
that priesthood. I'll gloss over that Orange County work, but I
survived it, and the takeover of Arthur Young by Ernst and Whinney in
1990, somehow.

I'd bought a Zenith 12Mhz 386 portable PC, and I was the first one
that had his own PC at Ernst & Young on the west coast. I put OS/2 on
it and set up dual boot with a Windows partition, an OS/2 partition
and shared a data partition. OS/2 'just worked' and I avoided Windows
crashes that plagued my peers. Thus I was more productive and I got a
lot more work.

In the early '90s an E&Y government practice in Dallas TX got itself
in a bind and I was flown in to get a dozen huge Excel spreadsheets to
run under OS/2, because Microsoft Windows couldn't handle that memory
load.

I kept using OS/2 through about the year 2000, and I even hacked Lotus
Notes to let me do that, after IBM dropped support for it, those
swine. And no, I didn't mention that when I worked for IBM shortly
thereafter.

I could tell you many more stories, from 9600 baud access to
mainframes through $100 per CPU-second charges and executive
malfeasance and other things, however my real point here is that what
you use had better work.

Whatever you use when you're on the road, it had better work. There
are no excuses. Whether that's Linux or a Mac is up to you, but it's
damned sure not Windows. I think IT professionals know this by now and
it will become more and more well known among the population at large.
We might hope so, anyway, and we should be doing all we can to make it
accepted.

Best regards to all,
Robert
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