Re: Strange Article
AppleTalk was great, and I loved how much faster the Chooser was than the Network Neighborhood, but your anecdotes don't seem to jive with reality.
I don't know where you got your ImageWriter, but I've never seen one with an AppleTalk card installed. From the documentation, and from the drivers that came with the Macintosh OS, I know they existed, but I've never seen one. Likewise, I never bought the software that would let me share my StyleWriter with the other Macs on the network. That was the domain of businesses that actually had enough money to spend. Also, you did have to worry which serial port your printer was attached to, except Apple labeled them Printer and Modem instead of COM1 and COM2.
Multiple screens were nicer than PC, but rare. If you wanted multiple screens on a Mac, you needed to get an additional NuBus card. Or, later, a PCI card. Powerbooks could run only one screen at a time, at best mirroring.
SCSI was nice, but that's what you get when you put workstation technology on a PC. Here are some shortcomings:
1) It was not hot-plug. All my Macs had a copy of SCSIProbe to activate any device that wasn't there when the computer first booted up.
2) It used manual addresses. 7 and 0 were SCSI controller and internal hard drive, respectively. But what about the rest? In the words of some forum philosopher, "WHO FUCKING CARES?"
3) It turned users into amateur electricians, because it required terminators to eliminate reflections.
4) Apple didn't keep up with storage technology. My Quadra 900 had 5 MB/s SCSI in 1991. My Power Mac G3 had 5 MB/s SCSI in 1998. Ultra Wide SCSI (40 MB/s) existed, but was the domain of expensive workstations and servers.
In one way, PCs were even worse than you describe. IBM introduced the PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors. Now, instead of 2 different ports for 2 different peripherals, you had 2 same ports that were not interchangeable. Plug the mouse into the keyboard port and vice versa, and you get an error when you boot up. Macs were so much better; you could plug keyboards and mice into the ADB in any combination you wanted. Keyboards even had ADB ports and power buttons, so you needed only one extra-long ADB cable to put the computer somewhere far away and give you some quiet.