PC or Mac

[sovereignrwe]

I am encouraged that nearly 40% of respondents to this survey own macs at the time of this post. I grew up on Apple products before the years when IBM owned the corporate world and before and during Apple changing the direction of computers by introducing an operating system that would eventually be poorly copied by Windows. (It should be noted that big business and open standards (not Microsoft but IBM) has forced me into the PC world. I owned Apple machines in the mid-to-late 70's. It should be noted that the PS/2 machines from IBM didn't show up until 1987 or so.

In the engineering world I lived in starting in undergrad, Mac was the system of choice. Not to say that we didn't use higher powered workstations for heavy load (for the time) computing.

Apple has always offered a better total package (hardware and software performance) in my personal opinion.

[Porky Pig]

Originally Posted by sovereignrwe

... Apple changing the direction of computers by introducing an operating system that would eventually be poorly copied by Windows.

Which Apple stole from Xerox after Jobs took a tour of the PARC facility.

[Silvertwinkie]

Originally Posted by Porky Pig

Which Apple stole from Xerox after Jobs took a tour of the PARC facility.

Actually, Xerox gave the technoloy away. The board and mgmt of Xerox took a look at the mouse and GUI and laughed the engineers out of the room.

The engineers were the ones who knew what they had and were miffed that Xerox would give the info away as they did. Not sure if Apple bought it, I can't recall, but it was not stolen from Xerox. Gates took the GUI from Apple who got it from Xerox, so if there was any theft, it was done by Microsoft, but even that is a somewhat harsh description of what Microsoft did...but clearly Gates took the idea off the Mac that Jobs had lent him.

[Buttercup]

Wait - It split 3 times since we bought it 95. How many bagger is that???

Originally Posted by markdoane

Let me see . . . (checking historical prices on Yahoo) . . Apple was trading around $40 back in Oct '04, and it's now in the mid $70's, figuring in the split back in Feb '05, you have a
3-BAGGER!

Congratulations

[markdoane]

Originally Posted by Buttercup

Wait - It split 3 times since we bought it 95. How many bagger is that???

Actually, you should have sold it in 1995 when it was $10/share, and bought it back at on Christmas Eve 1997, when it was $3.28 (split adjusted).

From 1995, you would have a 7-bagger. From Christmas 1997, it would be a 22-bagger. If you had sold in 1995, bought it back in 1997, and sold today, it would be a 70-bagger, but no one is that lucky.

You are better off taking the 80% out of the middle, than trying to time the market.

[Buttercup]

I just wish we bought 1000 shares then... Think about it.

Originally Posted by markdoane

Actually, you should have sold it in 1995 when it was $10/share, and bought it back at on Christmas Eve 1997, when it was $3.28 (split adjusted).

From 1995, you would have a 7-bagger. From Christmas 1997, it would be a 22-bagger. If you had sold in 1995, bought in 1997, and sold today, it would be a 70-bagger, but no one is that lucky.

Of course you are better off taking the 80% out of the middle, than trying to time the market.

[Davydd]

Since 1995 Apple has had two splits.

[Davydd]

Originally Posted by Porky Pig

Which Apple stole from Xerox after Jobs took a tour of the PARC facility.

Whatever. It was Apple that actually marketed the ideas to the people. Xerox was just sitting on it. And if Apple hadn't done so, Gates would have had nothing to copy and you would still be using DOS and competing heavily with CPM arguing the merits of amber or green screen text.

[Porky Pig]

Originally Posted by Davydd

And if Apple hadn't done so, Gates would have had nothing to copy and you would still be using DOS and competing heavily with CPM arguing the merits of amber or green screen text.

Or I could be using Apple ProDos. Mine came with a green screen.

[Westfalia]

Ugh, ProDos. That takes me back . . . I actually still have ProDos sitting in the basement on 5 1/4" floppy.

[myoung]

Wow, you guys are really very young. 5.25-inch floppies are modern. The first computer I ever purchased, a Wang in 1975, had an 8-inch floppy with a massive storage capacity of 156,000 bytes, if this old brain's memory serves.

A few years later, I bought a 10 megabyte hard drive that had 5 megabytes fixed and 5 megabytes on a platter that measured about 20 inches across. The drive itself weighted about 150 pounds and cost $30,000!!! That's $3,000 per megabyte circa 1979 versus about $250 for 160 gigabytes today or $0.0016 per megabyte!!

[markdoane]

1970. Anybody here run a DEC PDP-11?

[Silvertwinkie]

I saw those 8" floppies when I was in high school. We just looked at them and grinned. 3.5" disks were the rage at the time, but I still loved my 5.25 that I could use a hole punch on to get them to be double sided. I think the 8.5s were connected to a WANG terminal somehow, but we never touched the thing since we spent most of our time connecting Mac Pluses (1mb) with a 5mb hard drive under one as a server together across the building (a huge complex) to AppleTalk, or then called LocalTalk.

You know when it comes to computers, I feel like Michael Corleone. Every time I try to get out, they pull me right back.

[cowcreek7]

Mac PowerBook G4 17"
It matches my 06 28' CCD

[JStanley]

Yes, I used a Digital PDP-11, also the the -35 & -45. I don't recall the model of first computer I used in the late 60's, but it was made by GE in Phoenix. The first personal computer I used was the Digital PDP-8E and the I/O device was a Teletype model 28 with papertape. And it produced chad !!!

[jcanavera]

I used to be a computer operator and programmer in the early 70's at a local bank. The first mainframe I ran was an IBM 1410 that had 16K of memory. The first mainframe computer I programmed at the bank, a Honeywell had 32K of memory and a 3.5 megahertz processor. Our first really big mainframe was a Burroughs that had 50K of memory and disk packs that held 225 megabytes each.

What we have sitting on our desktops or laptops is something none of us could have ever dreamed about back in those days.

My first work on a PC was an Apple 2E. I was the treasurer for a parochial school. I used to do spread sheets on it. I thought I was in heaven.

Jack

[overlander63]

The three PC's I have currently operating in our home have more computing power than all of NASA in 1969, when man first walked on the moon.

[bugsbunny]

Macs -3 PCs - 1 soon to be none. I used Macs in college 20 years ago; switched back to Macs 4 years ago. Time spent on maintenance (and I am a heavy user) NONE! No software or hardware issues at all.

[myoung]

Old memories... I wrote my first computer program in college in 1963. Never took a course, however, because computers were too new then. As a freshman, I lived in Sperry Hall; the computer center was in Rand Hall. Can you guess the brand of the computer? How about the alma mater of Messrs Sperry and Rand?

[bilby05]

Started on Macs with a Mac Plus. Teaching graphic design on the Mac was the only way to go, still is. MacPlus to Mac Ci and Si and 6100, to PowerMacs now G4. But...being given the opportunity to teach an online course, I felt compelled to buy a PC, since most students have pcs at home, and I am expected to troubleshoot their problems from home. Actually they need Dr. Laura to troubleshoot their problems, but that's another story.

I have found the Dell laptop to be a good servicable machine, and once I got over the incredibly counter intuitive "housekeeping" processes, I find that most of the good graphic software works as well on both platforms. I still have my G4 at home and one at work and if money were not a consideration I would go with a mac laptop. (probably will someday again)

Where's the spell check on this thang?

cheers, bill b.