🚀 go-pugleaf

"I just read an article entitled "Newest Macintosh Deserves Honors as First PC 
"of the 1990s," which was forwarded to me from Compu$erve.  It was bylined "By 
"T.R. Reid, Washington Post Staff Writer," so I assume it first appeared in
"the Washington Post.
"
"Reid begins by praising the IIci's speed: "Our resident programmer, Homer 
"Reid, loaded in the estimable "MathCad" number-crunching program and gave it 
"a complex function to perform. Our 80386 MS-DOS machine took about six hours 
"to generate the first five solutions from this function. The Mac IIci 
"generated 11 solutions within 15 seconds, and would have kept going if the 
"answers hadn't run past the 14-digit limit of precision."  So far, so
"good.

Actually not.  I wrote that he has a real problem here.  The Mac IIci is
fast, but not 1600 times faster than a 386.  His DOS MathCad must have a
bug.

"	    "I found numerous Mac programs that wouldn't run on the IIci. It 
"	was bad enough to get that maddening "bomb" icon, which means the 
"	system has crashed.  Even worse, the computer sometimes crashed with a 
"	program disk in the floppy drive. This is bad news, because Apple 
"	forgot to put an "Eject" button on the floppy drive. You're supposed to 
"	eject a disk through system software. But once the system crashes, 
"	there's no way to get the unwanted disk out.
"	    "As a result, when you hit the reset button after a crash, the Mac 
"	sits there complaining about the alien disk in the floppy drive - but 
"	provides no way to eject it. There is no worse feeling in all of 
"	computerdom than the one that comes from sticking a screwdriver inside 
"	your new $9,000 computer to pry a disk from the floppy drive just to 
"	get the machine to boot up.

I wrote about this, too.  I believe that he loaded diskettes infected with
the WDEF virus.  This virus crashes IIci's upon diskette insertion.  He
might not have noticed it on another Mac, but the virus writer broke the IM
rules, and paid for it on the IIci.

He also ignores two other ways to eject the diskette: 1) the insert-paperclip
hole next to the drive; and 2) hold down the mouse button on reboot.

I'de like to see if he responds.  His classification as the IIci as the
fastest PC ever made is pretty nice, though.  (FLAME PROTECTOR ON.  Please
have mercy on me... He is talking PCs, and not "workstations", and the IIci
is darn fast--matching 50MHz Mac II accelerators in MacWorld tests...)
--


Wayne Folta          (folta@cs.umd.edu  128.8.128.8)