I have been a Macintosh user since 1988, but have been a computer user, like most of you, for much longer. I cut my computing teeth, oddly enough, on an Apple. An Apple ][ to be exact. This computer was a mainstay for many schools in the late 70s and early 80s. It ran an OS that most new Mac users would probably just scratch their head over today. But we were quite happy to write our BASIC programs, delighting in each successfully written program, confidant that we were of the computer elite. I moved on from my beloved Apple to a VAX mainframe, FORTRAN and COBOL. These were not "User Friendly" environments, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was all we had, and we were just glad we had enough time left in our account to finish projects before finals! Needless to say, by the time I got out of college, I had spent a lot of time in front of a monochrome terminal.

I have worked in the advertising sector for nearly 20 years now and have used a computer for more than half of that time now. The Mac made its way into my life at The Ramey Agency. I had the most experience on computers so I saw them as a great potential tool. The Agency was already heavily computerized. Every Account Executive had their very own shiny beige IBM PC to write their reports, conference reports and work orders. All running DOS in a Novell environment. We ran two separate networks, Mac and PC, until one day, we bridged them. Besides causing a lot of headaches chasing down network breaks, for which 10Base2 is notorious, it opened up our first cross-platform network.

When the Agency moved to new digs, we were able to get it right. A brand new 10BaseT network, CAT 5 and nice new switches handling all the traffic. Heavy users were segmented, but we wee still on the same network, able to share printers, but little more. Once TCP/IP routing came into the world so that mere mortals could understand and implement it on a network, we were truly able to share information cross-platform.

I have since moved on from the Agency sector, but I still use a Macintosh. The great thing about using a Mac in a primarily Windows workplace is that I have all the advantages of Windows services, from file sharing to communication, without the problems. Viruses, at this point have not been an issue for the bilk of the Macintosh community. Why write malicious code for 5% of the market? There are other advantages. Apple is a hardware company that just happens to write the best software for that hardware, so you don't have driver issues with the Macintosh to the extent that you do on Windows. The Operating System, (OS), is another benefit. The current OS on the Mac, OS X, is based on and older OS, Unix™. Unix was developed to be a fast, stable OS, and it has evolved over the years to do those things very well. And since Apple writes the OS and handles the hardware, update to one part of their OS or software it doesn't break something else. This isn't always the case, but it serves as the rule moreso than the exception.

So having a department of Macintoshes in a PC company is not only feasible, it allows 2 full-time designers to handle the advertising design needs for a company with 2,500 employees around the country, instead of a larger staff, on less agreeable machines.

Questions or Comments?
Email: Jim Temple