On 3/8/2018 12:14 PM, Tony Bogan wrote:
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!)
I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had.
Tony
Well, in the era, the "Mac" world and the "Windows" world, were two very different worlds. It was hard for people in one "world" to deal with those from the other. And, you had to go out of your way in one world, to accommodate programs and files from the other world. Files *content* had to be "imported" or "exported", although there were some universal file-content standards. Hard to imagine today, people who lived entirely in their own worlds. But file *systems* were very different. A file system is what you do, when you "format" a diskette or hard drive. The mac file system, included much more information about a file than WIndows/MS-DOS file systems. That's why in the old Mac world, you could click on a file and the correct program would "just run it"; not so much, in the Windows world, which depended on the "file extension" (still does). "why didn't people just ask the printshop, 'what format do you want?'" - Answer - those people did not know what "format" meant. The file ran fine on THEIR computer - what's the problem? As personal computers became consumer products or production tools, users became consumers, not techie experts. You might as well ask "why don't people know to change the oil in their cars?" Today, people don't know how to backup their own files! I gotta shovel some snow. Nice discussion. HErb apologizing for history -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net