Re: Strange Article
>Yes, with localtalk you may have been able to plug your laser printer straight in, but it only went at 256kb a second (IIRC) it was slower than Econet on a BBC Micro. The protocol was so talkative that the actual resulting bandwidth was piss-poor. The PC may have been a right old pain in the pain to setup the networking, but once you had you could plug in to Ethernet, or Token Ring and actually talk to other open systems.
Again, here is the revisionism, you thought it was crap, but it wasn't. IIRC LocalTalk barely got you 8kb per second, I mean, it was slow. No doubt about that.
But at the time it was reasonably fast because the files were tiny in comparison to today. Just the fact that you could network two machines together so easily is overlooked. Whilst someone on a PC was messing around Novell (?) the Mac did it from out the box with nothing extra, you could talk some secreatary over the phone in a few mouse presses how to share her files to another Mac.
As I said earlier, so many people overlook what a joy Macs were to use and work on, even back in the 80s and 90s.
Heck, if you want to see how overengineered a Mac SE was - I replugged a machine once - pulled the power cord out and stuck a new one in. In the second, to maybe second and a half that it was unplugged, it stayed powered! There was enough current in the PSU to keep it running!