I'll bet you do that a lot on your MAC. Of course, I recorded live small-group performances on several occasions using two mikes via a notebook PC, in one of my favorite "real" jazz clubs, about a decade ago. It wasn't a strain for the PC, and it wasn't a lot of bother for me. The two-mike technique was what we used in the '50's to get a realistic stereo-stage. Now that they like using dozens of mikes, you don't get that realism any more, at least not without a lot of post-session "fiddling."


I don't know anyone who pretends to do that on a MAC. Apple has only recently (gradually over the past decade) discovered that hardware works better than software for high-rate tasks.



I'm not so sure of that, except perhaps in the toy market. You can still get pretty good SCSI performance in a PC-server if you have to have it. You're right, it's not cheap, but neither is a MAC.


Servicing a stereo codec is not exactly a high-rate data transfer. You must be using external sampling hardware, however, since USB doesn't process audio. I have a couple of boxes that use a USB adapter to Ethernet. They don't suffer much either, but, after all, the transfers are packetized.



I did it using XACT, PALASM, and sometimes OrCAD for DOS. I found, and still do, that the old OrCAD386+ schematic capture still works 10x better in the sense that it's supposed to enhance productivity, than hundred-kBuck products form Mentor or Cadence. That's why Cadence bought it and killed its benefits by converting it to Windows. Using that old OrCAD 386+ autorouter, which, BTW, is available for free, I can have the gerbers and drill spec on their way to the PCB house while the Mentor stuff is still loading.

I don't read much of Stephen King's genre ... In fact I don't read much fiction at all any more.


Starting in the mid-'70's, it was obvious that APPLE didn't care about the user's work or data, so long as APPLE got their money. When everyone else, even the <$500 (at the time) computer manufacturers, did their best to ensure that their mass storage (floppies, back then) would always be read, or, at least that the software would always recover if not, APPLE's hardware would just give up and quit, waiting for a RESET. I moved a lot of APPLE-][ users to CP/M systems of one sort or another back then ... too bad I wasn't in retail ...

It wasn't much different with the LISA, except that it had a mouse.

When the MAC came out, they finally figured out it might be desirable to retry, at least a few times before "dying." Price became a factor then. One of my clients was wanting to buy a MAC printer, since one of the businesses in which he was involved used MAC's for illustrations, and I showed him where he could buy a complete PC system, including the latest LaserJet printer, ethernet shared, for less than what the MAC printer cost. He even got a NEC 16" (big for the time) color monitor and adapter in that package.

I found it interesting that the Apple management argued for several months over whether they should sell the MAC for $1995 or $495. I figure it was overpriced at $495 ... Like a lot of their products, it was several years before it "worked right." Quite a number of people ended up with 'em because they were in the illustration/artwork/advertising business. I suppose that niche belonged to the MAC back then. There wasn't much else that it did back then. Some pretty good graphics software was produced for it.

However, lots of people like having what's "kewl" even though it doesn't really do what it should as well as advertised. If that weren't the case, nobody would use a cellphone.


Not exactly. IIRC, it was not only mostly software, but, in fact, largely the same software, albeit without the MAC environment. It seems the majority of the MAC processing bandwidth went to making the lack of hardware work, which is an admirable goal when you're trying to make money for the shareholders, but doesn't serve the users well, since the features you advertise are then for the benefit of the shareholders and not for those to whom you advertise them.


That's not what I regret. I do wish I'd invested the nearly $100K I wasted over time on Apple hardware in Apple stock instead ... they're down, now, but so's everybody else. The primary thing they're able to produce, irrespective of their product quality, is profit. People who love "kewl" at any cost are their just and legal prey.


Gee ... I thought you were a MAC user ... and hate PC's ...


Perhaps, but that's because it's software. It still works (and I prove it every day) better than any Windows schematc package, even those costing multiple tens of thousands, some of which are on hand but idle. It has a bunch of devotees who still use it every day to make their livings. I wouldn't qualify for those ranks, but I do use it to generate my schematics. The output is just as ugly as that from any Windows product, but since I can subsequently prettify them with CorelDraw, it's adequate!



The problem I've observed seems to have little to do with USB and much more to do with Windows. Being a protected-mode OS, it prevents user I/O to whatever I/O you have, so I rely on DOS when I have to use PC-specific hardware. A pentium-class machine at over 300 MHz will do nearly anything I need on a parallel port using EPP mode. ISA-based machines are considerably slower on that port, but the motherboard-based parallel port works at a pretty good clip, to wit, SMSC was able to produce a target interface IC (obsolete now, sadly) that demuxed the traffic on the EPP into a fully funcitonal full rate ISA bus, which you could then drive from Windows, yet wouldn't interfere with your system if somehting broke. It even refreshed the DRAMs in the "usual" PC-AT way, at the "usual" rate.

Unfortunately, the parallel port is gone, now, and USB has an interaction with Windows that makes it difficult to use for sustained high-rate data transfers without large (approaching GByte size) external buffers.

It's a good thing SDRAM is cheap!

Eventually, some sort of smaller, at least smaller-market, computer will become available for doing technical work... one that doesn't tolerate the arbitrary pauses and diversions that Windows brings with it. Too bad LINUX isn't much better in that regard. DOS with a RAMDISK still works quite adequately.

RE