🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <537gi8$fhi@boursy.news.erols.com> davegrow@erols.com (David P. Grow) writes:

   Karen Chiu <chiu-scharf@worldnet.att.net> writes:
   > Erin Coe wrote:
   > > For a five-year old, getting a high-powered computer is not that
   > > important. If you plan to use it yourself, you'll have to look into it a
   > > bit, but for a young kid...pretty much anything.
   > 
   > This is actually not true. The kid's software runs agonizingly slow on
   > a low power computer, and the kids get antsy waiting for the screen to
   > fill or the sound to start. A business user running spreadsheets and
   > word processing actually can use a lower powered machine than a kid's
   > machine.

You have to look at what software you *really* need to run, even for a kid.
New, CD-ROM-based games with lots of sound and fury are indeed glacial on an
old machine.  But a lot of older games are perfectly fine on hardware that
may, indeed, not even have existed when the games came out.

   My brother-in-law is a professional programmer and died in the wool PC
   guru.  His daughter simply wouldn't play learning games on the computer
   (and she is a VERY bright girl despite this tendency).  However, we put her
   in front of my Mac with the same game and she went to town.  The better
   color, better monitors, better sound, and better interfaced grabbed her
   attention quickly and made her love the very program she had been avoiding
   for a year.  [Reader Rabbit 2 is the program involved.]

My guess is that the same would have been true if she had simply switched to a
newer PC.  The same goes in reverse--move kids off a B/W Mac to a hot new
color PC with a big screen and see what happens.

   My other experience involved a friend who didn't want to buy a Mac to
   replace his old 286, but ultimately decided he'd give it a try.

Same story.  A 286 is hardly new technology anymore.  Replace a 20-year-old
Volvo with a brand-new Yugo and you'll see an improvement, too.  For a little
while.

   Remember, too, that the Mac will hold one more benefit for the child.  In
   the Wintel world, you need to buy a new car every time Mr. Gates repaves
   the road.  The 386 couldn't handle Windows 3.1, and the 486 wasn't able to
   handle Windows 95.  The Mac, by contrast, hasn't left its users in the
   dust.

This is simply false.  The 386 DOES handle Win 3.1, and the 486 DOES run Win
95, if you have enough memory.  On the other hand, when I bought my brand-new
Mac II, much of the software I could find for Mac simply wouldn't work.  When
I upgraded to System 7, a lot of what was left stopped working, too.  Now
there are probably not a dozen programs still on the market that come on 800K
floppies and run on a 68020.  In another year there probably won't be any.
I don't buy software for the Mac anymore.

By contrast, every single one of the programs I bought for my 8MHz PC-XT will
still run on my 120MHz Pentium.  Windows is a twisted, contorted piece of
barely-useable junk, but it's that way to preserve compatibility with as much
old software as possible.
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