Going Mac...maybe.

[NuBota]

We are currently phasing out our last VMS system running on 400MHZ Alpha chips in a cluster. I will miss it. Rock solid. Rock solid.

However, the hardware is well past the point of being economically repairable should it fail. And finding someone with the knowledge is gettng hard, too. Those old DEC guys were snapped up by Compaq, then HP. There are not too many of them left. The maintenance contract on the hardware exceeded the cost of new windows based servers. The software that we were running on it is 10 years old, and it is just now being ported to Windows. That tells you how stable it was and no need to port over until now.

The little 486/33 laptop that I mentioned earlier is DEC, too. Great equipment.

I was one of those guys - always considered myself a "Digit", even when I became Compaq/HP. DEC made great HW and SW - but had horrible marketing. We had products that were a decade or more ahead of their time. All the "hot" stuff today, MS Exchange/Outlook, Lotus Notes, system clustering, Directory Services, etc, was being offered in 1984/88. And I, of course, considered our consulting guys they best in the business

We had a VAX/VMS system on Wall Street - had an uptime of 10 years - not many can claim that....

It's nice to hear you had positive experiences as well - there are still some left in my work circles, but they are fading. Never heard 'em bad mouthed, other than being called dinosaurs...

-Eric

 

[NuBota]

Before I went into IT - I was in retail - last gig managing a chain store that sold software and video games. PC games were one of the, if not the biggest, driver for PC sales to the home user. People would see 30 shelves of PC games and 1 for MAC. This was before the 'Net was even really accessible. Computers offered better graphics than console game systems back then and a greater variety of game types. Sony changed all that with the Playstation.

MACs originally had better graphics capabilities back in the day. The were preferred, along with Amiga, for graphics intensive applications. The PCs eventually caught up.

As far as the HW - my point was the same quality HW is available for both platforms. All the components are modular and made by different vendors - not Apple or the PC maker - with the possible exception of the motherboard - but even then the components/chipsets soldered to the board are off the shelf. For the PC - it's just a matter of what the quality of the components that are selected when the box is assembled and how well integrated they are.

As with most of these debates - there is no right and wrong. I agree that the avg home user would be very well served with a MAC. But I'm not sure I can even say that because I don't think I could characterize the home user today. Small businesses, telecommuters, gamers, students - for many it's not just Web, email and word processing anymore. The MAC would never meet my needs. Heck - I was all ready to switch to Linux as my home OS - but Quicken doesn't make a version to run on it - so I haven't. Yes, I could run emulators or VMs, but now the system is no longer "pure" and I will deal with issues similar to the PC. In my retail days I saw many users dump their MAC because their was a piece of software they wanted that was not ported for MAC. Even though the MAC today is much more versatile, it is hard to bring those folks back.

Bottom line - M$ has killed of a ton of better products through the years and become the de facto standard- For many, that point alone is enough to make the decision to deal with the headaches of PC ownership.

-Eric

 

[ihookem]

Well, since this post has drifted can I ask a few new questions? I have a pc laptop with Vista and I hate the thing. I had xp2000 pro on the last pc and liked it. Can I get rid of vista and reload 2000 xp? It would be nice. This Acer laptop from Best buy crashes and freezes worse than anything I've had. I wonder if loading xp would help? My 16 yr old daughter is nagging for a Mac and just might get one. I just serf the web and email stuff and write proposals once in a while. I don't think one person mentioned the cost of a Mac. How much? Is watching movies better on a Mac? we have Netflix and can watch movies on the pc for free but the picture is BAD! If a Mac is better then a Mac can double as a new TV. Maybe I can justify that. Prices anyone?

 

[MossRoad]

Well, since this post has drifted can I ask a few new questions? I have a pc laptop with Vista and I hate the thing. I had xp2000 pro on the last pc and liked it. Can I get rid of vista and reload 2000 xp? It would be nice. This Acer laptop from Best buy crashes and freezes worse than anything I've had. I wonder if loading xp would help? My 16 yr old daughter is nagging for a Mac and just might get one. I just serf the web and email stuff and write proposals once in a while. I don't think one person mentioned the cost of a Mac. How much? Is watching movies better on a Mac? we have Netflix and can watch movies on the pc for free but the picture is BAD! If a Mac is better then a Mac can double as a new TV. Maybe I can justify that. Prices anyone?

I've heard that most Windows OS licenses are backward compatible. That is, if you own Vista, you can unload it and load Xp or 98 and the license covers it. You can back load all the way down to W3.1 if you want. I think you have to own the media that the OS came on, but am not sure. I know there were lots of folks that bought new PCs with Vista and legally downgraded them to XP. You might want to check it out.

 

[MossRoad]

I was one of those guys - always considered myself a "Digit", even when I became Compaq/HP. DEC made great HW and SW - but had horrible marketing. We had products that were a decade or more ahead of their time. All the "hot" stuff today, MS Exchange/Outlook, Lotus Notes, system clustering, Directory Services, etc, was being offered in 1984/88. And I, of course, considered our consulting guys they best in the business

We had a VAX/VMS system on Wall Street - had an uptime of 10 years - not many can claim that....

It's nice to hear you had positive experiences as well - there are still some left in my work circles, but they are fading. Never heard 'em bad mouthed, other than being called dinosaurs...

-Eric

Well, Eric, I sincerely congratulate you on your association with DEC. They were a top notch software and hardware company. Not only that, they had a great group that would coordinate and install other people's software on other people's servers. When Compaq bought DEC, they slowly eliminated the Newspaper group. Bummer. Great guys. We still contract the services of one of the guys for our Editorial and Classified advertising systems. They were big in the Newspaper industry. They had a great support system. That is why, I heard, Compaq bought them... Compaq had a lousy customer service operation until they bought DEC. And their Storage Works systems are awesome. Compaq, then HP based all of their storage systems on that. Great stuff. I currently maintain about a dozen RAID arrays with many terabytes of storage. Probably close to a hundred disks between them. Something really cool about walking up to an operating RAID array and yanking out a running hard disk and the thing keeps running without a burp!

HP RAID arrays are really sweet (based on the DEC Storage Works). One reason we choose Compaq/HP over Dell is the one hot spare, multiple arrays on one backplane that they offer. Dells needed one hot spare for each array and that wastes slots and disks.

Also, we choose Compaq/HP desktops over Dell because of past issues where we would order a batch of PCs to a specification. The Compaq/HP machines were guaranteed to have identical components inside. We could go back a year later and get more of the same. With the Dells, we could get computers, all spec'd the same, but no guarantee of the same components inside. They might have different manufacturers of NICs, HDs, video cards, etc... For example, a batch of 20 computers had three different NICs. That required three different GHOST images, or a reinstall of the NIC drivers after a rebuild. What a pain!

 

[NuBota]

Moss - thanks again for the kind words - and yes I'm a big StorageWorks fan too. I don't want to divert the thread - so this is my last post on this subject - I could write a book....

You post hits home though - A DEC consultant was intended to be there to meet the customer mission - regardless of the HW/SW involved - and in many cases integrating heterogeneous systems from different vendors. My last customer gig as an HPer (I am independent now) was an enterprise ERP solution - Sun Solaris systems on EMA12000 based SAN storage - talk about heterogeneous - was a great integration challenge.

I have worked many jobs in my life - for some major corporations too - but I was never as proud of any like I was working for DEC. Not only great products, but they treated us great as well.

I would say the relevance in this thread - the best is not always the standard or holds the most market share - and in many cases doesn't survive. I give Apple credit for keeping to its vision, creating a quality product, and surviving......

 

[jgrreed]

Well, since this post has drifted can I ask a few new questions? I have a pc laptop with Vista and I hate the thing. I had xp2000 pro on the last pc and liked it. Can I get rid of vista and reload 2000 xp? It would be nice. This Acer laptop from Best buy crashes and freezes worse than anything I've had. I wonder if loading xp would help? My 16 yr old daughter is nagging for a Mac and just might get one. I just serf the web and email stuff and write proposals once in a while. I don't think one person mentioned the cost of a Mac. How much? Is watching movies better on a Mac? we have Netflix and can watch movies on the pc for free but the picture is BAD! If a Mac is better then a Mac can double as a new TV. Maybe I can justify that. Prices anyone?

Check apple.com. There you can customize the machine you'd like. Dunno about watching movies on the Mac. I've heard some good things about appleTV which allows you to network your TV/home theatre with your computer.

-Jer.

 

[SnowRidge]

I've heard that most Windows OS licenses are backward compatible. That is, if you own Vista, you can unload it and load Xp or 98 and the license covers it. You can back load all the way down to W3.1 if you want. I think you have to own the media that the OS came on, but am not sure. I know there were lots of folks that bought new PCs with Vista and legally downgraded them to XP. You might want to check it out.

I just bought a new ThinkPad. It came with Vista Home Premium installed and XP Pro on disk. It was my first look at Vista. It took me all of ten minutes to decide I didn't want it. XP Pro and Debian Linux now live on the machine.

 

[jgrreed]

What do the medical instruments use? What kind of box is on a those big whole-body nmr machines you guys like to charge us so much to climb into? The high-powered specialized graphics systems we used to see, like Sun and Silicon Graphics and others whose names I have forgotten, mostly seem to have been absorbed, like DEC, or simply gone away. I wonder if they have proprietary computers on those Gawd awfully expensive toys, or use one of the two remaining "standards".Chuck

Heard back from my buddy last night who's a GE tech...... Linux.

-Jer.

 

[jgrreed]

Playing a good game on an Xbox or similar is nowhere near playing on a high end PC. People pay a lot for a good sound system when they could listen to a radio and hear the same music.

After responding to every Mac Zealot accusation on this post as fast as possible with raised blood pressure, I will admit that I fully plan to build myself a PC (with the help of a friend) for flight simming. Reason being that multiple video cards and multiple monitors are easier, and cheaper, on a PC.

I've done some reading on this, and it seems that MS Flight sim can be run quite nicely on a Macbook Pro or Mac Pro (not a Macbook according to what I've read, not enough graphics power) using parellels or fusion, but not to the same extent as on a high powered PC.

I'm sure someone will ask, why not play x-plane?? Seems that it's good too, but I'm just more familiar with MS FS X.

Once it's built I'm going to keep it off the web except to update and play (ie. live weather).

-Jer.