©2000 Joe Carson

Over the years, I have noticed as many of you also have that the majority of IS (Information Services) people dislike Macintosh. This dislike ranges from simple disdain to overt loathing and hatred. Of course, as we all know, this negative attitude is quite irrational and each time the "reasons" for the negativism are examined closely they prove to be quite false. We often hear such inanities as "Macintosh doesn't support ethernet". Oh? Then why has almost every Mac made for more than a decade included Ethernet as part of the motherboard? We also hear that it costs more to support Macs or mixed systems, a claim that flies directly in the face of studies going back more than a decade from G-istics, The Gartner Group, Evans Associates and the Federal GAO that come to precisely the opposite conclusion. Since the reasons given usually prove to be irrational and simply not true then other reasons for the dislike of Apple's efforts amongst the IS industry types must underlay this attitude.

Before I go on, I would like to state that not all IS people are so negative about Apple. Many truly competent and properly trained and experienced IS people not only know how to work with Macintosh systems but can make them work harmoniously with mixed Windows and Unix networks. To these hard working IS types I must give credit and applaud their efforts to try to give their employers the most efficient , cost effective and productive networks possible. Of course, this automatically excludes MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) trained IS types.

One clue as to the antipathy to Macintosh may lie in the Geek syndrome. The Geek Syndrome requires that whatever you have must be cranky, touchy and unreliable so that the Geek can show off their abilities by making this unstable technological mess behave. This is why so many young Geeks love Wintel machines with their inherent and maddening technical problems. Kevin Legister's article "Powerful Simplicity: The Needs of The Few - IT Technicians Still Not Getting IT" posted at MacDiscussion examines the Geek aspect of the technical types disliking Apple. After all, with a Mac being so simple to deal with the Geek has nothing to show off, and besides, he is usually unable to impress Mac types as he can a Wintel user with a snow job of techno-babble. Mac types usually know that all their verbiage is meaningless hot air. That doesn't sit well with a PC-centric Geek.

Another clue may lie in a posting that appeared at an IBM support site over two years ago. In this posting, the PC-centric IS type was seeking anti-Apple ammo to stave off a new influx of iMacs that he was unhappy about. What follows is the pertinent text from the posting:

I am the network manager of a mid-size company. We are currently fitted with PCs (around 65 running Windows 95, of which about half are from IBM) running on Ethernet. Everything was fine until last week, or until top management starting talking about replacing all of them with iMacs.

In fact, they have started bringing in two of those machines on Monday. This was for a test, and I was sure they were going to be sent back right away, since they are incompatible with our PCs. But, to my surprise the secretaries were very happy with them, and set them up on the Ethernet by themselves in about 10 minutes. The worst thing is that they have Office 98 and can access and exchange transparently files with the other PCs.

The problem is the last batch of PCs we got (three machines from Compaq and Windows 95) took us half a day to configure and set up. Top management couldn't believe it when the secretaries got their machine up and running so quickly. Also, they like the fact there is no floppy drive, so they say, nobody can copy software for home use.

We are afraid they might really replace all the PCs with iMacs and if those machine are so easy to set up and maintain, I might be out of work soon.

Can you help me, or give me some ammo against Apple Macintoshes?

In short, the truth is that a Macintosh based network simply did not need him and he feared for his job security. He was seeking help in maintaining his cushy featherbedded and essentially redundant job!

Now we are getting warmer. This antipathy towards Apple is based more on fear and selfishness than on any technical point. In fact I think we should go back and examine the history of computing from the beginning until the present. Therein lies the truth.

In the beginning we had ENIAC and Leviathan. These were two early computer projects born during World War II to meet the needs of calculating artillery and bombing tables. Using even mechanical calculators to help the mathematicians trying to generate these tables as fast as they could was simply not good enough. ENIAC enabled mathematicians to generate in a few minutes tables that could take hours or even days by hand. Leviathan was the British counterpart for similar purposes. These early computers filled enormous rooms with hot vacuum tubes and mechanical relays. The programming was "hard-wired", that is that telephone cable connectors were moved about over a large telephone styled plug board to progam the machine. Debugging was done by examining the lights that flashed on a simple bit map display. In fact, the term "bug" came about when a failure of a program to execute was traced to a squashed insect caught in one of the mechanical relays. By comparison, a modern Palm PDA has several times the computing power of these early monsters.

It was not long before it was realized that by using a higher level language, mere mortals could program a computer and they could become more useful. Thus were born COBOL (COmprehensive Business Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) and the next hardware step, UNIVAC. With the development of COBOL and FORTRAN came the first professional programmers and the forerunners of the IS departments of the future.

These early computer techs seemed so impressive that when Business types started using computers for basic business needs they were almost afraid of this new technical Priesthood and did anything, literally ANYTHING, that they said to do. These early white-coated Priests of the Computer God noticed this power that was conferred upon them and they liked it. In fact, they liked it a lot! After all, what other employee could tell the boss what to do and get away with it?

For the programmers and early IS people this could be called their Golden Age. The Golden Age started to come apart in the late 1970's with the advent of a new technical development that the IS types tried desperately to stop. Personal microcomputers.

Some companies had a handle on the idea of a personal microcomputer, such as Digital Electrical Corporation (DEC), but in a classic Dilbert-esque blunder, the top management failed to see the potential of the personal computer even though they had the ability to produce one as early as 1975. The proposed DEC personal computer, the rainbow, was delayed until well after a couple of unknown phone hackers working in a garage came up with the first essentially self-contained personal computer for public purchase, the Apple ][.

At first the IS types ignored the Apple ][ as a mere toy. Of course they were right since the first Apple][ had a simple 8 bit processor working at 1.08 MHz and a simple integer basic, supplanted later with a variation of Microsoft basic called AppleSoft. It could not really do very much.That changed with the advent of VisiCalc. This simple spreadsheet program took the hobbyist's toy, the Apple ][, and turned it into the first business microcomputer capable of serious financial analysis. It was so simple that even the top executives at major corporations could use it and make sense of it. This did NOT sit well with the entrenched IS Priesthood of the time. They would even order their own bosses to get rid of them and often their bosses would comply out of awe for the majesty of this entrenched IS Priesthood. However, not everyone complied and the IS priesthood was facing the first major threat to their continued existence.

Shortly after the success of the Apple ][ a series of other Me-Too! computers such as the Commodore PET computer, later replaced with the Commodore 64, the ATARI series of simple 8 bit computers, and even the tiny Sinclair/Timex computer appeared to try for some market share. Of course the first attempts of competitors to poo-poo Apple came with the early CP/M (Control Program/ for Microcomputers) computers using the fast (by the standards of the time) 6 MHz Zilog Z-80 chip. These early machines were manufactured by a wide variety of makers, largely forgotten now. While claiming CP/M "compatibility", they in fact used completely incompatible file and disk systems. Of course while the CP/M types were busily poo-pooing the Apple][, they carefully neglected to mentioned that the one computer platform that ran the most CP/M was the Apple ][ with an installed Z-80 card. There were more Apple][s running CP/M than all of the dedicated CP/M computers combined! In fact, the one compatible "standard" used in the CP/M world was the Apple CP/M implementation. In other words, the anti-Apple types' habit of ignoring inconvenient facts is nothing new.

The Apple-CP/M business dichotomy unraveled in 1981 when IBM introduced it's first IBM PC. IBM wanted to get in on the microcomputer market since it thought that it might make a small profit here. They still regarded mainframe computing with it's attendant crew of lab-coated IS types as the proper way to go (an attitude to which many in IBM's management still maintain), but if there is some profit to be made, why not? So, they took an obsolete early 1970's minicomputer as the base for the design. They had the problem that they were already using the Motorola 68000 in a then-current model of minicomputer and knew that it could not make a microcomputer that came too close to this machine's performance, so they chose the worst possible chip they could find that would look good on paper. Thus they chose the Intel 8088 chip, a real piece of techno-trash, but it could claim to be a 16 bit chip when almost everything else on the market was only 8 bit. That really looked good on paper. In reality, early IBM PCs usually were thrashed by 8 bit CP/M machines and could barely keep abreast of "slower" Apple ][ machines in real performance (using VisiCalc as the common referent program) even though they claimed to run two and a half times faster than the Apple ][.

The IS types were now in a quandary. They wanted to keep their high tech Priesthood and status intact, but now not only had they failed to stop the executives from using Apple ][ computers with VisiCalc, but now their former ally IBM had effectively joined in against them as well! So they decided to join the move to microcomputing rather than fight it. They sided en masse with the IBM PC because at least it was a Big Name company that still made Big Iron computers and there was some hope that things may go their way if they chose sides carefully. Of course, the bosses listened to them since as the old saw goes, "no one ever got fired for specifying IBM". The executives wouldn't know an IBM PC from a Royal Typewriter, but they knew that IBM was a Big Name so they agreed. Besides, wasn't the magic word "Business" part of their name while the Apple was named after a piece of fruit, fer Gawd's sake!?

Enter Microsoft. Claims to the contrary, the IBM PCs were not introduced using MS/DOS. That came shortly thereafter and at first IBM specified using their own PC/DOS system. IBM didn't really license their full technology to the cloners, but only portions of it. There were critical parts of the PC BIOS that remained proprietary and IBM expected that software makers would support the IBM BIOS and any attempts to run software on one of the many little clone startups would fail. They were almost right, but two events foiled them. One is that Compaq succeeded in making a legally cloned workaround of the IBM BIOS that worked. In fact, it worked better than the original IBM BIOS. Also, Bill Gates bought QDOS (Quick & Dirty Operating System) from a programmer who had almost no business sense at all for the tiny sum of $15,000 and ran with it. QDOS was renamed MS/DOS. Its biggest advantage was that it could bypass IBM's proprietary BIOS routines with its own software routines. That made it possible for IBM cloners to run head to head with the IBM PC. After that, IBM slowly lost control of the IBM PC clones.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... What was Apple doing? Well there was the ill-fated attempt to produce the Apple III computer that went over like a lead balloon. Then (to keep the story short...) Apple embarked on its Lisa project and then the Macintosh project. The Lisa was a technological marvel and horrendously expensive. The Macintosh was almost affordable (at least when compared to a $10,000 Lisa) and became a hit with some people, although a bust with the hard core computing crowd partly because of the tiny 9 inch screen, the complete lack of expandibility and the then unproven concept of a graphic interface which techie types disdained.

However, whatever faults or advantages the early Mac had, it's real problem was a simple one: IBM had not developed it, Microsoft had not created the operating system, and Intel didn't make the processor. Without these three names attached to the technology, the old enmity IS types felt about Apple's bringing about the demise of their cushy little empire came out. It was also far too easy to use and network a Mac on a peer-to-peer level and that did not sit well with the IS types who needed systems of great complexity (and unreliability) so as to maintain their jobs. Needless to say, they lobbied hard within the circles of Corporate America to block out Apple. They had a vendetta and they intended to get Apple if they could.

Eventually networking systems for common microcomputers were developed and both PC and Apple platforms were capable of being networked via a server. In fact, many cross-platform solutions exist, notably DAVE from Thursby Software Systems, Inc. and PC MACLAN from Miramar Systems, Inc., but to hear many IS types hostile to Apple, they will claim that there are no such solutions on the market.

I can only conclude that as a matter of history, that the IS industry is dominated by people who have never forgiven Apple for initiating the downfall of their Golden Age when all bowed down in awe before them and gave them their every wish. Today, they are ranked somewhere below the mid-level managers and somewhere above the janitorial staff although they still wield considerable power over technical decisions. I think they fear continuing events may erode what little is left of their old status since even Microsoft seems ready to back away from operating systems as other technology is overtaking them and they seek a new monopoly elsewhere. Apple is again threatening them with their move into a powerful form of Unix that even a mere secretarial typist can manage. Apple is again creating something that makes them more of an anachronism than ever. In short, the whole anti-Apple thing in the IS industry is nothing short of a selfish, crude vendetta.

joecarson@applelust.com