[Ti] Does not compute!

[Mike Stanley]

On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 02:05 PM, Christoph Pistor wrote:

> choosing DOS as an example was just to point how little Apple about
> backward compatibility cares. As you just pointed out there is no
> problem installing Windoze 98 (probably System 8 equivalent) or the 
> same
> ol NT 4 on a current Wintel machine.

No, I don't believe I said that.  I just reread my message and nowhere 
do I see me saying "there is no problem installing Windoze 98 or the 
same ol NT 4 on a current Wintel machine.

*Many* things could come into play that would make that either 
impossible or not worth the trouble, although you might, with the most 
plain-jane of systems, be able to squeeze out some functionality from 
it.  You'd never be *supported* in that configuration, however.

What you seem to be doing is trying to draw analogies to things that 
you have little or no understanding of.  I don't fault you for not 
knowing much about DOS, Win98, NT, Win2k, etc, just like I hope you 
wouldn't fault me for not knowing the ins and outs of what took place 
years ago when Apple switched from the 68k processor family over to 
PowerPC.  But I'm not going to make sweeping claims about OS 7 or OS 8 
and support for this and that and bash Microsoft based on it (mainly 
because I'm frank enough to admit I don't know much about them) so I'm 
not sure why you are concerned with me pointing out that claims you 
yourself stated you weren't sure about simply aren't accurate - and 
almost certainly aren't really similar to the situation you're upset 
about in the Mac world right now.


>  And this I know for sure cause I
> have done so! But all I want is to run System 9 on a new machine and I
> soon won't even be allowed to do that anymore?

Well, you're changing the name of the game now, but that's ok.  So you 
took some random new machine (last month?  last year?  two years ago?) 
and installed 98 on it, even tho it came with ... ?  That's not DOS, 
which would be near pointless, but I do see what you're saying.  I 
stick to what I said earlier, though - I can't see anyone really doing 
what you're describing - buying (and paying) for a new machine with 
WinXP on it, then blowing it away and putting 98 on it.  They *might* 
be able to do it - if they could find drivers for every single device 
in it - which is a big IF nowadays - but to what purpose?  Most, if not 
all, of their software would work just fine loaded under XP.

I think what you veteran Mac users are used to is something we on the 
Wintel side have only very recently come to enjoy - not worrying about 
drivers and such - just install the OS and it works.

You want to buy a new machine and install a several year old Mac OS on 
it and Apple might not let you.  That sucks for you and it may suck for 
some people but its just going to happen.  Maybe Apple can tweak that 
Classic mode some more and make it give you the kind of performance or 
hardware support you need - I don't know.  But I'll say it again - 
depending on the Wintel side to back up your desire for backwards 
compatibility is just about pointless - although maybe that is because 
Microsoft was able to make the DOS box work much better than the 
Classic box works - I don't know.

> I still do not understand which of my statements was wrong. As you 
> said yourself:
>
> "You
> *might* be able to get it to work, albeit with almost no functionality
> compared to what you'd get out of WIndows XP, but Dell would laugh at
> you if you called up wanting help with it.  Apple's just making a move
> that is necessary (in its opinion) to move forward."
>
> In your own words you aren't sure yourself if it is possible or not, so
> how come you are getting angry and telling me that I am wrong, where 
> all
> I tried was to find out from somebody who knows (which does not seem to
> be you!), whether or not I am right. Which was exactly the reason why I
> used the formulation "correct me if I am wrong".

Well, let me put it this way.  Can I make a new machine *boot* to a dos 
floppy disk?  Sure I can.  I might even be able to do a handful of 
administrative tasks once I'm there.

But DOS, in and of itself, for the reasons I posted earlier which you 
do not include in your quotes, will provide almost no functionality on 
a current machine.

You want to boot a brand new G4 a year from now into OS 9.  Presumably 
when you boot into OS 9 you would expect to DO the things you are used 
to doing with OS 9.  You want the OS to recognize and be able to 
utilize the hard drives.  You want OS 9 to be able to run your video 
game you bought last year on the new video card.  You want OS 9 to be 
able to process sound through the sound system.  You want to be able to 
connect your devices - USB, firewire, etc, to the G4 and have it work 
through OS 9.  You will basically expect the same functionality you had 
on the last Mac you had.  To make all of those happen, as has been 
proven by the new dual G4's, Apple would have to build support for 
those new pieces of hardware INTO OS 9 - but you wouldn't have that - 
so they'd have to make it possible for you to get them.  Support 
nightmare - pointless development costs.

That's what you want to do.  And that's fine - you can want to do it.  
But saying "I should be able to install DOS on a new Wintel machine" - 
which I am relatively certain you could not do in a way that would make 
*sense* and be functional and expecting that to carry your argument and 
desire for continued OS 9 support is, well, silly.

What if ALL you could do was boot off your OS 9 CD next year in this 
new machine? Will you be happy?  Because that's functionally all you 
could manage to do with a DOS disk on a new Dell machine today.  Boot 
it up, maybe recover files off the hard drive (with third party 
software).  But *use* the computer?  No way.