Delurking... (nice surprise with an old app)

[Claude Bolduc]

Hello all...

I've been lurking in this list since shortly before making the plunge 
and getting myself a (maxed out) TiBook on Dec. 22, 2002.  I must say 
I've been in awe ever since I first opened it: the PowerBook G4 is 
simply a great computer.

To make a long story short, the TiBook is not my first Mac: this honor 
belongs to a Fat Mac I bought in 1985 from the fruits of two years 
worth of summer jobs.  It served me well, very well (among others, I 
used it to publish my residence's newsletter; page layout and editing 
done wholly with MacWrite and MacPaint).

The only software I did buy then (save for Infocom's HHGTTG and, once 
at University, Word) was Hypercard, which I used extensively in my 
Translation studies as a much more powerful way to keep a personal 
translation database than index cards (what our teachers were insisting 
we ought to do).

After a long stint in IT (in Ottawa, it pretty much meant embracing the 
Dark Side), I decided my next computer would be a Mac when I first 
heard about the first-generation iBooks (what a look these laptops 
had!).  Since I had kept everything on floppy archives when I gave the 
Mac to my younger brother -- he was still using it 15 years after 
purchase -- I was somewhat hesitant about whether I could get the files 
back, and whether they'd still be legible by the newer programs.

I eventually did get everything back... and just for kicks, I 
double-clicked on my translation stack.  To my jaw-dropping amazement, 
it launched! I could consult it just like I used to do, albeit in a 
tiny 512x342 black & white window).  The implications are staggering : 
I used to run Hypercard in Mac OS (well, Finder) 1.1g.  This means 
Apple kept, in OS X, enough of the original QuickDraw API including I 
surmise a fair amount of old code: the 680x0 emulation layer is still 
present in OS X (albeit in Classic mode), for a 16 year-old application 
still runs.

This would be utterly unthinkable in the Windows world : the great 
majority of programs written for Windows95 can't even launch in Windows 
XP, yet this is akin to seeing Write or Paint 1.0 (written by Microsoft 
for the visual horror that was Windows 1.0) run smoothly in Windows XP.

That's what I like Apple for: we may gripe and complain, especially 
about the price of its products, but allowing old apps to run in the 
newest and greatest OS takes time, and therefore money.  You do usually 
spend substantially more for an Apple computer, but you also get 
something priceless in the exchange: greater quality.  I've been 
troubleshooting PCs long enough to know.

As I told my father when, a few months ago, he asked me whether he 
should buy a Mac or a PC (he's a complete novice), "If you want to 
scratch your head a bit, buy a Mac.  If you want to bitch, complain and 
be driven plain nuts by idiosyncracies, problems and bugs, buy a PC."

Claude Bolduc
Mac History: Mac 512K (1985), PowerBook G4 (2002)

P.S.  I may still have to (shudder) get a PC, most likely a laptop, to 
replace my ailing Pentium II: Translator Workbench, the one software 
package I can't do without in my present work in Translation, doesn't 
run in VirtualPC... and no Mac version will ever come out for Microsoft 
owns 20% of the company's shares...  That's also why I've only recently 
switched back to the Mac.

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