Platform Wars: Macintosh-Based Digitization Systems

Extract

Improvements over the past few years in essentially all modern operating systems coupled with the blurring of the boundaries between mainframes, workstations, and personal computers make the choice of platform often one of personal preference other than of necessity. A decade ago there were very distinct differences between the features offered by IBM PC and clones, the Apple Macintosh, and UNIX workstations. These differences included price, processing performance, OS features, look and feel, graphical capabilities, memory and disk limitations, networking capabilities, ease of- use, system stability, development tools, etc. Since then many of these distinguishing differences have evaporated making platform selection a more subtle issue, but also much less important. However, there are still a great many users thai tend to make such decisions based on their “religious” preference of platform rather than based on objective information.