Big on Macs

It's refreshing to see an article about OS X. But why does DeMaria keep talking about System 7? I haven't had System 7 installed on any device for at least five years--and Apple announced last year that it would be discontinuing support for System 9.

System 9 is still around because a lot of video and graphics shops invested heavily in SCSI devices and the software that supports them. There are still AppleTalk printers around as well--we have an Apple LaserWriter 16/600PS, but it runs fine on the network and is available to every machine on the LAN running OS X.

As for the G5 RISC chip, it has a lot of headroom and is a true 64-bit architecture, unlike Intel's mature x86 CISC designs. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) will have full 64-bit capability.

Daniel Reiss
President and CEO
Automated Terminal Systems
[email protected]

Michael DeMaria replies: Thanks for writing, Daniel and Chad. I was surprised initially at how easily I got Mac OS X 10.3 to work with Windows systems, especially after the bad experiences with 10.1 and the native Windows file-sharing protocol SMB (Server Message Block).In my article, I refer to System 7 only because I consider it the last major Mac OS platform. The development of Mac operating systems may be broken down into several "eras," if you will: OS X; System 7 (which covers everything from 7.0 to 9.2.x); System 6; and pre-System 6. Vendor support varies in the System 7 era (some do only 8 and above, others 9 only, still others 7.5.5 and above), but I doubt any significant number of Mac users out there are running an OS older than 7 today. So to differentiate, I treat pre-OS X as the "System 7" platform.

Love those PDFs

At the risk of sounding overzealous, you guys are awesome! I just found out I can save articles from your Web site as PDF files. That's great, since I've come to rely on your comparative product analysis a great deal.

Jeff Swenson
Network Administrator
Recon Automotive Remanufacturers
[email protected]Brad Shimmin replies: Thanks for your letter, Jeff. Yes, bucking the current trend of putting page views before people, we've built a freely available PDF service for all our stories. Our hope is that this will help you simplify your own product evaluations by arming you with fully formatted, handout-ready materials.

You can find this service from the toolkit box within each story. Just look for the download icon next to the text that says "Download as PDF."

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