kennethr@idt.unit.no (Kenneth Roar Iversen) (01/18/90)
I hope this is the right place for a request like this, if not you must excuse me. I am in the middle of a discussion on whether or not to buy any more Macs. Today we have about 120 IBM-compatibles, 60 SUNs and 12 Macs, all in a Ethernet environment. The "IBM"s use PC-NFS, the Macs TOPS to the SUNs that are servers. Today our maintenance staff only know the "IBM"s, mainly because the Mac-users have done everything themselves. Now, my application for a new Mac has been turned down (so far), and so for all the applications for Macs. The argument against buying Macs seem to be a claimed to be increase in maintenace costs. I would like to get argument both for and against buying Macs in our situation, and some comments on the "anti-Mac" argument. I have heard some rumours that Stanford University (CA, USA) has "thrown" out (som of) the IBM-compatibles at the expence of Macs. If this is true, can anyone tell me why? MaKenneth R. Iversen University of Trondheim Division of computer systems and telematics (!?!?) N-7034 TRONDHEIM NORWAY Internet: kennethr@idt.unit.no
weyand@csli.Stanford.EDU (Chris Weyand) (01/22/90)
kennethr@idt.unit.no (Kenneth Roar Iversen) writes: >I am in the middle of a discussion on whether or not to buy any more >Macs. Today we have about 120 IBM-compatibles, 60 SUNs and 12 Macs, >all in a Ethernet environment. The "IBM"s use PC-NFS, the Macs TOPS to >the SUNs that are servers. Today our maintenance staff only know the >"IBM"s, mainly because the Mac-users have done everything themselves. >Now, my application for a new Mac has been turned down (so far), and >so for all the applications for Macs. The argument against buying Macs >seem to be a claimed to be increase in maintenace costs. >I would like to get argument both for and against buying Macs in our >situation, and some comments on the "anti-Mac" argument. >I have heard some rumours that Stanford University (CA, USA) has >"thrown" out (som of) the IBM-compatibles at the expence of Macs. >If this is true, can anyone tell me why? Yes this is basically true. A few years ago there were mostly IBM-compatibles here at Stanford. Now we have several mac clusters the main cluster consisting of ~70 MacII's and IIcx's. I believe the reasons for switching to Macs are one, Apple provides them at a low cost and two, they are excellent for teaching such things as langauges, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Programs like lightspeed pascal which is used by all of our intro programming classes is very user-friendly. The Mac in general is much more approachable by computer-novices than is an IBM or clone. The Macs in the cluster are linked by a local network that allows access to laser and imagewriter printers. They are also connected to the EtherNet. This all seems to work pretty well. Chris Weyand weyand@csli.Stanford.Edu .