Date: Fri, 12 Dec 97 02:13:17 -0900
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Tidbit - I Just Bought a Pentium... Now Where'd I Put That Mac?

Keyword: Advocacy, Why Macs Are Better

This tidbit is from:

steinerl

Well, I did it... I bought a cheap old Pentium off of a friend, for the 
first time since I converted to the Mac cause, from the now-defunct Atari 
and Amiga platforms.

I'm a tinkerer. I always have been, and I love using my Powerbook 1400CS 
because although just about everything in my system folder is in beta 
testing or hacked shareware, it keeps on running stably. I evangelize 
like a trooper to all my PC-using friends, and have helped one of them 
pick a Mac for his first computer purchase, so many of my friends were 
surprised when I bought a used Pentium from a coworker.

When I bought the Pentium, the first thing I did (after trying out a few 
Windows-only CD-ROM's I had lying around) was to wipe Windows 95 off the 
hard drive and install Linux, the true "hacker's OS" for Intel-based 
computers. As a tinkerer I enjoyed a day or two of playing with this old 
favorite, and then I opened the case to poke around inside.

Well, before this week my big complaint with PC's has always been with 
Microsoft-made operating systems, as the Mac has always served me much 
more elegantly and stably, but I discovered that there's even more to 
like: the integration between hardware and software. Although I am no 
stranger to the difficulties of configuring and running programs and 
shells (especially X-Windows) on Unix systems, I wasn't prepared to have 
my workstation freeze on me and refuse to acknowledge the existance of 
all drives, just by removing the cover of the computer.

Call me old school; my first Mac (a Color Classic) never gave me trouble 
like this: there was a cool little cover on the back that could be 
removed by pressing two tabs, and the motherboard slid out like a drawer, 
ready to accept more memory or an FPU or whatever I cared to hack onto 
it. I never worried about "BIOS" or "CMOS" or video card incompatibilites 
due to having the video built onto the motherboard, and I never 
experienced the dreaded blinking question-mark disk--and still haven't, 
all these years later.

Now it's several days later and I finally have a login prompt back on my 
pentium, but to my Mac-ized perceptions the work to get it there was 
inordinate: seems a program I ran from Linux to check what kind of video 
card I had was incompatible with the proprietary BIOS and somehow damaged 
it to make restarting impossible. Then when I jiggled the hard drive's 
power cable by removing the cover, forcing me to restart, the computer 
passed the memory check and froze: no disk activity, no options to enter 
setup or restart, no prompts for activity or even an error message to 
show me something wasn't going right. I had nearly every PC guru from my 
workplace over to check my Pentium and see what they could do; none 
helped.

Eventually I got it running, but I see that I'm going to have to change 
my tinkering ways and start handling the PC with kid gloves, which is 
something new to this user who never restarts with the shift key when 
installing new software on my Mac, never zaps the PROM, never rebuilds 
the desktop, runs known incompatible software at the same time, never 
cleans out his keyboard, steals all the clock cycles for the 64-bit RC5 
encryption challenge (on the EvangeList team, of course), drops the poor 
PB and spills beverages on it, generally abuses the poor computer, and is 
more productive than all of the Quake-playing, Windows-reinstalling PC 
masses I work and socialize with.

So here's to tinkering, and to my platform of preference on which to do 
it: Apple Macintosh. Keep up the good work, 'Listas.