🚀 go-pugleaf

Excerpting a couple recent posts:
>From: werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (Werner Uhrig)
>Subject: Re: Mac for SALE!
>Message-ID: <3864@ut-ngp.UUCP>
>
>... I'd advise my friends to refuse to pay more than $1000, especially as the
>400K drives are next to useless today.
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Damn!  And here I am, using TWO of 'em whenever I use my Mac!

Really Werner, this is a bit prejudiced.  More below.....

>From: ngg@bridge2.UUCP (Norman Goodger)
>Subject: Re: Cheap ROM Upgrade for 512K Mac ??
>Message-ID: <212@bridge2.UUCP>
>
>>  Come on APPLE you probably could have also offered just the ROM by itself !!
>
>... Who in world would want to run on a 400k internal and an 800k
>external, what a pain? sticking in a 800k Floppy, Can't read it asks to
>init it, accidently erase it. Or Have the data you need on a 800k floppy
>and you have the startup in the 800k and you can't use the internal and
>you need to keep the startup in the external to do whatever you might be doing.
>... It seems awfully dumb to me to want to stick to a dead horse in the slow
>400k disk drives, thats why Apple tied the roms to the disk drive, I think
>...Roms by themselves, sure it would work, but it would be a real pain to use
>and there are no advantages to doing so. Unless you like to mix Apple's &
>oranges with 400 & 800k disks, and then its only a matter of time before
>you mess up and lose something valuable ...
>
>Norm Goodger @Bridge Comm Sysop-MacInfo BBS.@415-795-8862 bridge2!ngg

To me, and undoubtedly many, many others, there would be a very real advantage:
money.  The upgrade would cost less, and my investment in an 'older' model
would not be quite as devalued.  Besides, if I'm stupid enough to lose several 
hundred K of data by initializing a disk with files on it, that's a consequence
of MY choice to configure my system that way.  It's no more likely with this
combination of disk drives than any other.

***MILD FLAME FOLLOWS***

Both of these posts typify, in my view, a real trend by the 'hard-core'
Mac types to ignore machines that are not the 'state of the Mac art' and
ridicule or at least underrate the users of same.  I don't know ANYONE 
personally that has upgraded to a Mac 512E or Mac Plus.  Many of us just
do not consider the hassle of these upgrades to be worth the improvement.
We don't use our Macs constantly.  We don't compile C programs.  We don't
consider a decrease of a few seconds in launch time to be worth several
hundred dollars.  We don't feel the need for systems with 25 fonts and 15
slick DA's.  We can't write off upgrades and hard disks as necessary
business expenses or get our employers to pay for them.  We are USERS, plain
Jane types who just want the Mac to do some tasks for us, or give us
access to electronic networks, or maybe just to play games on.  The old, 
boring, and yes slightly too slow 512K Macs work very well for an awful
lot of us.  

Sure, I'd LOVE to have a Mac with a Meg or two of RAM, a 40MB SCSI hard
disk (we use 'em here), a matching SCSI tape drive, and an 800K internal disk.
I'd also like a MIDI interface, and an 8 channel synthesizer, and all the 
great sequencer and music composition software there is out there.  What the
heck, I'd like to have PageMaker and a Laserwriter to help my chorus put
out a good bulletin, too.  But, other things (like restoring an older home 
and paying for it, etc.) are just more important to me now.  I don't have the 
money to keep my Mac up to the latest state, and I won't for a long, long time.

So don't be so caught up in your wonderful machines and the great things they
can do that you forget about us that don't share such a single-minded devotion
to technology and computing.  Apple isn't selling all it's Mac production
to developers, corporations, and gurus.

**FLAME OFF**    Sorry this got a bit long.....

-- 
Notice how they do not so much fly, as plummet. {appropriate head movement}
                                    --Monty Python (Flying Sheep Sketch)
Andy Hogan   Rosemount, Inc.   Mpls MN
path: ...ihnp4!stolaf!umn-cs!mmm!rosevax!hogan