LETTER: Macs have proven worthy on campus

---

by Rick Russell

---

To the editor:

In reading Mr. Spieler's editorial ("Exclusively Macintosh campus does not make any sense," Thresher , Feb. 2), I am forced to wonder if he is living in the present or the past.

As a full-time consultant for User Services who supports PCs with Windows 95, I concur that Windows 95 has a great deal to offer, and that in today's market there is little reason for adhering to any brand name computer or operating system simply on the basis of past achievement.

However, if Mr. Spieler would be so kind as to travel back with me to 1988, the era when the Macintosh computer was in its heyday on this campus, he would find a radically different landscape.

At the time, there was no competition with the Macintosh in many important areas.

There was no standard for network printing on the PC. There was no widely accepted operating system with a graphical user interface.

There was no font standard, no standard for networking hardware nor even standards for high-resolution displays or large monitors.

There was no standard for high-speed external storage devices.

The Macintosh had all of these; it was the only choice for a campus trying to make the best of its networking facilities.

In only a couple of years, the Rice Macintosh network grew from a few isolated workgroups using the built-in Localtalk connections to a highly interconnected set of Ethernet-capable Macs in dozens of Appletalk Zones with many publicly available file servers and printers.

So what mistake did Rice make 10 years ago?

I can't imagine what it was. We supported the only personal computer capable of satisfying users' needs.

The landscape has changed, and if Mr. Spieler wants to print to a Windows 95-attached printer or send files to another Windows 95 computer at Rice or across the world, he can do so on the campus network.

In time, the Rice campus network will support Windows 95 just as well as it supports the Mac today.

It will take some time for the infrastructure to build up, of course. Rome wasn't built in a day, and we will hardly be ready to equip the colleges with used Windows 95 machines until a few years from now. But much of what Mr. Spieler wants is here now, if he's willing to learn how to use it.

Rick Russell

Consulting Specialist

Jones '92

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the February 9, 1996 issue.

Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights Reserved.
This document may be distributed electronically, provided that it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted without the express written permission of:
The Rice Thresher, Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX, 77005, USA.