To tread, once again, over old ground;

Like many I learned to program Fortran in the days of punch cards and batch processing and fiddled with various electronics projects where you constructed your own "computer" but the first "serious" computer I could be bothered buying (around 1979?) was a Kaypro transportable (think sewing machines) using CP/M as its OS (later 'pinched' by Gates et al. and reissued as Micro$oft's DOS); command-line interaction was 'the go' and, until about 1990 or even a few years later, it would still do 90% of the tasks that 90% of users would want, even if it didn't have a clock, and that suited me just fine.

But I had to teach for a living and Apple IIe boxes were 'the go', especially because they had an OS called ProDos (also later pinched by Gates et al. to use as a name for a later version of their DOS) which supported a primitive but effective combination of word-processing, spreadsheets and databases called AppleWorks; there were better solo programs elsewhere but AppleWorks was great for beginners. Of course, if you wanted to fiddle with music files, nothing then could touch Atari.

And then came Macs. The characters who liked fiddling with carburettors and tweaking strange knobs hated them because you had to obey Mac rules when writing code for them, unlike the users of Intel and Atari boxes who could get into the innards and root around. Trouble was, they all came up with their own (and very different) implementations of what each thought was "the very best way of doing stuff."

At the school I taught at 70 students from Year 7 to Year 12, with cleverness ratings from "well below average" to "extremely bright" started the day with nothing but ideas, an Apple IIe and two Mac Plus machines; by the day's end there were 70 copies of a 70-page publication of sophisticated graphics, articles and crossword puzzles to take home. Everyone had had to have a go at the keyboards and mice and you couldn't do that with any other machines (at the same prices) at the time.

In the late 80s, if I wanted to teach Farmer Bloggs how to start from scratch with a computer, use it to do simple word processing, spreadsheets and databases on any Intel machine I'd have to teach the commands for four different sets of operations as each application had its own specific ones, different from each other and different from the OS. On a Mac I could do it all in less than an hour.

Thankfully, both religions have pinched ideas from each other, although Mac users would probably argue the traffic was rather 'one way'. Many people forget that, while Micro$oft sold the "best" spreadsheet of the time specifically for the Mac (Multiplan) their wordprocessors were nowhere near the best on either OS; they used their Multiplan profits to develop Word and later upgraded their spreadsheet to Excel. But now, both systems are functionally equivalent and, with the exception of some specialist applications you can do most things equally well on either OS.

But, for 90% of things for 90% of the people, they're easier on the Mac.

I use both at work and so own both (not the newest of either but they'll do) and my extremely well-informed techo mates describe me as a MacVolvo driver (a serious canard in Oz); one day I'll learn Unix, use it to drive the Mac (OSX is based on Unix anyway) and claim bragging rights as a seriously competent computer user. In the meantime I'll do what sensible people do; use the tools at hand to do the job required.

Cheers, Rowan