I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of the flames wars between Mac and PC people.

Right off the bat, most of the folks who bad-mouth Apple or Wintel aren't qualified to do so. They don't use the other platform, and they aren't familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. In other words, they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

That includes most of the journalists who write about the Mac.

That includes the few Mac journalists who waste their time (and deceive their faithful) evangelizing Mac as if it was the only game in town. As anyone who's ever used NeXT or UNIX or Sun will tell you (and tell you), it's not.

What you get out of an OS depends in large part on what you want to get.

Is the Mac an easy-to-use and easy-to-install OS? Yes. Is it sophisticated? That depends on what you want to do.

Is the PC an easy-to-use and easy-to-install OS? Yes, and No. Is it sophisticated? That depends on what you want to do.

We read claims that Mac is a "toy" that is rapidly headed to extinction. Tell that to the pre-press folks doing PhotoShop rendering in a production environment. Most of them use and prefer high-end Apple.

We read claims that the PC is a diabolical Wintel plot to chain the world to command-line mnemonics and obscure, unwritten DOS rituals. Tell that to the programmers who are more comfortable, and can work faster, in a command-line environment anyway (there are some things, like sorts, changes, replaces, finds and deletes, that a command line can do better and faster than a GUI)!

You can't convince me that the 80% of the households who buy Compaq, Gateway, IBM and Toshiba are stupid. Or, that they were misled, duped, enslaved, or cheated. Most PC (and Mac) buyers know exactly what they're doing, or are willing to learn.

Now, this brings up an interesting point. What about the minority of PC buyers who don't know what they're doing, and aren't willing to learn?

Chances are, someplace along the way, they bought a Mac, and they still don't know what they're doing, and they're still unwilling to learn. Too many folks on both sides will sit at a machine for two years, complain they just can't get it to do what they want, never look for or at a manual or "dummies" book, and grouse that the stupid machine should have been easier for them to understand.

Don't get me wrong, some PC buyers have nightmare-ish problems that aren't their fault. Some Mac buyers have similar problems that aren't their fault, too. But the problems are surmountable, if you're willing to try. My gripe is that, in my experience, the ones who complain the loudest about the opposite platform are the ones who know least about it, and exhibit even less interest in finding out.

In many cases, this vocal minority also turn out to be members of the camp which believes in knowing as little as possible about its own platform.

I've met self-acknowledged "experts" on both platforms who couldn't tell me, when asked, what system version they were operating, or how to customize my STARTUP menu (if on Windows 95), or what Control Panels and Extensions they have installed (if on Mac System 7). I have met some who couldn't even say for sure what machine they were using. And I have met a few of these who were even charging money to others for dispensing advice.

From what I read online, and in the press, some of these folks must have moved on into journalism instead. But there are also some high-visibility critics in both camps who are technically educated, passingly familiar with both platforms, and highly trained in writing agenda-ridden rhetoric for the masses. You don't see these folks writing in technical journals, but in magazines and newspapers aimed the general public. They're not pushing facts, they're peddling a mass movement which depends on blind faith and dependency on a Leader.

So much for the distinction between journalism and evangelism.

The MacOS interface used to be the only game in town, but now it's just another pretty GUI. It's cooler than Windows in a lot of respects still, but it's hardly grounds for switching platforms. If you have a hard time navigating in Windows 3.1 or W95, chances are you'll have an easier time in the MacOS, but you still won't like it. I would recommend buying a book, or joining a SIG, and getting good with whatever you've already got.

The MacOS filing system is easier to use than its Windows counterparts, but it's due for a welcome low-level overhaul. There are more cool utilities (both commercial and shareware) just for customizing the Mac Finder, than there are utilities for the PC, period.

I can and do routinely take apart my Mac system folder and put it back together again, from the hundreds of its parts, without any installer or uninstaller program. Try that in Windows. (There are people who can do it, though).

Commercial programs: there are more first-tier commercial programs available for the Mac than anyone could ever use or even try, and they'll do pretty much anything you could possibly think of. What gripes PC users (and I think they have a valid beef) is that there's no port for many of the specialized PC programs: if you belong to a professional association of dentists, who use a certain program to track their patients and do the billing and send out the reminder notices, chances are there isn't a Mac version. The PC version is so specialized to begin with that there's only a marginal market for it; a Mac version doesn't make a lot of sense commercially until we can port code in both directions which runs not like a hack, Bill, but like a real gen-u-wine application.

And that's coming, sooner than you think, whether Apple goes down the tubes or not. Developers have already lost a lot of money over the platform wars, and even over in-platform system revamps. The code is becoming modularized, so it won't know or care what platform is running it.

Plug-and-Play: Macs have always "been there". Wintel is "getting there", but they're not out of the woods yet. Software installation on a PC is dicey; there's a good chance there'll be a problem that can take a week to resolve, if it ever installs at all. Hardware installation is insultingly insane.

The single biggest reason most PC users don't know a lot more about their environment is that they're afraid of it, and with good reason. This has got to change. MacOS and integrated machine architecture has been, and will continue to be, the biggest catalyst for this change.

Standardization of machine parts, for one thing. The PC clone thing was the best thing that ever happened to the IBM camp. It took Mac clone makers like Power Computing to shake Apple up into offering motherboards with replaceable CPU daughterboards. It always griped me that my PC friends who wanted to upgrade could just go down to Fry's and buy a new board, while I had to go out and buy a new machine. It took me three years to work up enough courage ("It voids your warranty!") to upgrade an internal hard drive. Those old, bad Mac days are over, but it was a helluva struggle.

DOS, for another. I know what you're going to say. Even if you're a PC enthusiast, I know what you're going to say (unless you actually buckled down and learned DOS). Now that Windows is more or less free of a crippling dependency on DOS, people are staying away in droves from (what I understand to be) a powerful macro and command-line language which works well at a system level. Apple took half a decade to develop AppleScript, which was good because it is event-driven, and bad because it wasn't well supported or promoted. People are afraid of it, even though it's recordable and supported by a modern GUI of its own.

DOS was insulting when it was the only way you could run an AT or XT. GUI's then were a poor token imitation of a Mac thing (nee a SPARC thing), and, frankly, early PC's would have been far better off without them at all.

DOS underneath a modern GUI is cool, even cooler than you think, which is easy to say because you probably think DOS sucks. Stay with me on this. I always meant to learn DOS, but I'll do UNIX instead. Where do you think the DOS syntax came from?

Standardization of applications. I don't mean that Windows applications operate uniformly from vendor to vendor, or even within the Microsoft Office suite. They don't, and this is a disgrace. Most Mac users don't realize how fortunate it is that Apple developed and enforced its Human Interface Guidelines.

What I do mean is that pragmatic corporate buyers enforced an interconnectivity of the status quo which permits Windows users to network with other Windows users everywhere. Yes, I know Apple was doing this in the eighties. Yes, I know it doesn't always work very well on the PC side, but it's the de facto standard. Apple ignored the fact that the rest of the world was marching to "a different drumbeat" for too many years. Playing catch-up is hell.

Hey, it's true. They did. If old man Henry T. hadn't come along with his Model T, almost single-handedly inventing mass production, General Motors as we know it might never have existed.

I don't hear a lot of Ford owners crowing about that today. So, get over it.

I use Windows every day at work. For the first year, this was Windows 3.1. I wouldn't say it was "cool", but it was adequate. I never cracked the manual, for I quickly found that ten years with the MacOS made me a sought-after guru in things like copy-and-paste, locating files, composing and formatting text documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and file creation, transfer and backup. I already know how these things should work, and they pretty much did.

This freed the real Windows gurus from the trench-level stuff, so I could lean on them to show me how to configure my printer drivers.

Then, we got Windows 95. It's cool. I still don't think it's as cool as MacOS System 7, but it does many things better than Mac anyway. I look forward to firing up my machine in the morning!

My PC files copy onto PC diskettes. which my Mac reads the same as any other file. Within the Office suite, the files open indistinguishably on either machine. Actually, I don't bother with floppies any more. I just email them to myself at home and download them for use onto my Mac. And I'm still teaching people how to use Windows 95. But, I'll tell you what:

I can hardly wait to find out if System 8 ("Rhapsody") will support both drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste in Finder, as does W95's Explorer.

(For Windows folks, Finder's been the Mac standard for what you now call Explorer or File Manager. It has supported drag-and-drop for years, but not copy-and-paste. Go figure.).

I learned how to customize my office STARTUP menu, in a mainly-Mac conversation in the lobby of the San Francisco Hyatt Regency. My big break came when one of our friends, a Windows 95 literate, realized he could answer my W95 questions without getting his head chewed off. Cool!

I ordered my copy of "Windows 95 For Dummies" today. Thinking about the milestone that represented is what engendered this essay.

So what's the difference between a Ford and a Chevie? Not as much as there used to be, that's what. Gone are the days when you heard Chevie owners whining defensively, "Hey, a Chevie's a perfectly good car!" Mac chauvinists, get over it.

Some Mac owners, reading this, may say: "you've sold out". Jobs and Wozniak should have thought of that when, in the mid-80's, they signed that limited MacOS licensing agreement with Microsoft. Blame the anti-trust attorneys and courts, if you're still looking for villains after all these years. Don't blame me (or the general public) for not boycotting Chevrolet out of the business.

There are those who resent comparison of Macs and PC's to Fords and Chevies. Mercedes or BMW, perhaps, but not Fords? They have a good point, but if the Apple Performa line hasn't been the household workhorse of the personal computing world, tell me what has. You want exciting? IBM's Aptiva and Power Computing's Power Tower Pro, that's exciting.

I can't tell you what operating system you should buy. The stock arguments are usually good enough:

If you have to interface constantly with a PC environment at work (and if that's not exclusively Microsoft, which deserves a lot of credit for making Mac/PC file transfer seamless), and if you understand little or nothing about file translation, and if you own no machine at all now: you would probably be better off buying what everybody else already has.

If you have no particular vested interest in being bound to a PC, and your interests run to the kinds of things you can do by yourself (graphics, word processing, desktop publishing, art, programming, database, internet, running a business from home), and you plan to concentrate heavily on one or more of these areas, then you would probably be happier and more productive with a Mac.

If you know nothing about machines, and want a personal computer just for yourself, and don't need to lean on a peer support group to figure out machinery, buy a Mac.

If you know a lot about computers, you already know what you want, and you probably own it, too. I think it would be presumptuous to say you ought to throw out ten years of software and learning curve, just because some other platform has an inherent edge in some areas.

My Mac clone benchmarks faster than any Pentium Pro on almost any task assigned to it -- yet I confess I've toyed with the idea of getting a PC as a second machine, just to cash in on all the software and machine subsidies PC owners get at my place of employment. Mine is a solidly Wintel, solidly anti-Mac company. DOS/Windows cards for Mac are stupid no matter what else you believe, when you can get an entire machine for the same money or less. For me, either would still be a dumb frivolity, and I wouldn't use it. I can already work from home, and get everything I normally need to do done, on my Mac -- a little easier than if I did it on my PC in the office.

I consider myself loyal to Apple (no matter that my fast new machine is from Power Computing). I don't have a huge emotional vestiture in which direction the industry goes. In fact, I don't care which way it goes, so long as that's what it takes to go forward. I expect machine and software advances to spin off as benefits to you and me, no matter what platform we prefer. I think they will spin off much faster with Apple healthy and growing.

My loyalty to Apple consists of this: I hope it again leads the way in bold moves that force the rest of the industry to follow. I think Amelio is the fellow (if anybody) who can pull this off.

Amelio envisions Apple machines running on a UNIX core, backwards-compatible with older Mac software, with the best of the NeXT OS giving us a stable, memory-protected, multitasking MacOS well into the next decade. Not only does Amelio envision this, he is doing it. What he envisions is Apple machines running PC software, some variant of the long-talked about Common Reference Hardware Platform (CRHP).

Amelio isn't alone. What Sun Microsystems has really done with Java is earth-shattering. The possibility that platform-based programming languages are already obsolete is with us now. If it can be made to compile and run on any platform, why stop with program source and object code? Why not ALL of it?

Java is a subset of C/C++. C in turn is both language and parent of the UNIX operating system. UNIX easily supports sophisticated cutting-edge operating system shells like Be and NeXT, but UNIX is also the internet server platform of choice for really big installations. It's the most stable of them all, closest to the language it's written in (C), and, yes, if you like command-line syntax for making global changes in a really big hurry, you'll be in hog heaven with UNIX.

There is something really big in the wind.

How big? It could unseat Wintel, that's how big. For that much money, I do think we'll all be surprised how fast Bill Gates and Andy Grove can move when the corporate bottom line is at stake. I don't see them as becoming "unseated". I see them improving, cooperatively interfacing with the new technologies, and making another bundle converting us over to the new standards. If it helps us get there, great, but UNIX is not a proprietary Microsoft product.

This is enough to make industry heads at least sit up and listen. Windows NT servers are not going to cut it in perpetuity. Java-like languages and CRHP give them a choice, without being locked into one operating system or one motherboard manufacturer. CRHP also makes it possible for you or I to more intelligently invest in a combo of machine and system that fits our own personal needs -- without being cast as the misanthropic hermit on the mountaintop.

CRHP doesn't mean MIS managers will let anybody run whatever they want, but it does open the possibility of billions in savings over the long run.

Better yet, CRHP further opens doors to the possibility that we won't forever need MIS manager types, and their huge technocracies, on a scale such as we endure today.

There was some tongue-clucking when Microsoft recently announced it was dropping plans to develop Windows for the PowerPC. The real question is, what the hell would have been wrong with them if they had? There's a fair chance that Motorola chips will be running native Windows first, and there's an even better chance a future RISC chip will be running just about any platform you want it to run. You won't have to sweat it unless your first name is Andy and you're locked into a Pentium architecture. Bill Gates will never get inextricably locked into anything he doesn't own outright. Let the PowerPC come to Bill Gates.

While some Ford and Chevie owners are sniping at each other over who has the better carburetors and the most crash-proof fenders, the whole industry is moving on just as if the snipers didn't exist. So get a life. I say it's time to grow up. Get a Mac. If you prefer, get a PC. Wait a while, and you can probably have both. Mac and PC people, working together for once, both sharing similar technologies and both pressing raised expectations upon the industry, can't be as bad as a few Wintel traditionalists and Mac feudalists would have us believe.

This document was composed and set in Microsoft Word 6.01a for Macintosh. It was exported to HTML by Microsoft Internet Assistant for Word. It can be read on any platform without self-destructing. The HTML can be viewed on Netscape 3.0, or it can be viewed on Microsoft Explorer 3.0 (as long as the text isn't served up to Explorer by JavaScript).

©1997 by Alex Forbes and Talking Crow Productions.