First time I got a Mac at work, I was horrified. The Mac Shuffle (if you've been a Mac owner for a long time, you know what I mean) was a continual annoyance. When cheap hard drives became available at the 40 MB level and above, that problem was eliminated.

The other annoying thing was the appearance of that stupid bomb icon for reasons only those who had been initiated into the mysteries could fathom. It's the Mac equivalent of the PC's Blue Screen of Death. I no longer hate Macs. Also, I hear their OS is based on unix now, which is great. Before I got my dual processor PC, my machine used to crash several times a week - sometimes every day for a week. PC's seem to handle resource management very poorly. I got into the habit of rebooting every morning whether I needed it or not. The fellow in the adjoining office, oth, has had the same Mac for nearly two years - running almost 24/7. He's only rebooted the thing about 4 or 5 times ever - and just last Thursday he was telling me he had his first system crash - in nearly two years. There's a difference between us, though. He was using a Mac for administrative purposes (email, writing papers, briefing slides, etc) and an SGI for his substantive work. I was using a single processor PC (NT) for both things simultaneously. In my view, NT was a real operating system which distinguished it from it's predecessors which were almost monitor programs. OTOH, the things which distinguished NT as what I would call a real operating system (like resource management and process level security) didn't seem to be implemented very well.

Anyway, the Mac is a great computer. It's different than what I'm currently accustomed to, though. And it's very difficult for me (and probably most other people) to wrap my mind around new ways of thinking and behaving. I get into a rhythm and I don't like changing. (Hey, I refused to use full screen editors for about a decade after I first saw them. I stuck not with a line editor, but a character editor called TECO.) Part of it is stubbornness, but part of it is just being tired of learning a new thing every couple months.

k