Travel and Fine Art Photography. Articles and Images by Krish Mandal, New York Photographer

Macs vs. PCs

So just about the time I was graduating from Michigan with my Bachelor's in English, the Mac vs. PC war was just getting started. The factions split between those who needed to do data-intensive work (engineers), and those who wanted to write simple papers and create "pretty" looking documents for B-School. I had actually known nothing about PCs, except that they really didn't do a whole lot that I wanted. The interface was basically a keyboard, and a mouse with a stupid blinking cursor. You wrote papers using the granddaddy of word processors called WordPerfect, and that was the choice of businesses in the day. Microsoft Word? No way, you wouldn't get hired if you didn't know how to use WordPerfect. Needed to create a graph? Uh-oh. Better get to a Mac, produce the graph, print it, and then cut it out with scissors and paste it into the blank space in your document printed on the dot-matrix printers that the PCs used.

But I stayed staunchly on the Mac side. I had no reason to use a PC, I wasn't an engineer anymore (I left engineering school to be an English major), and about the only thing you could really do with the PCs was to play some neat PC games. PCs were cool if you wanted to copy things like games, and back then Macs didn't have a whole lot of games except possibly card games and Mahjong. Boring.

So there were the people who insisted that Macs were the thing (the Literature & Arts people), and then there were the people who wanted to number crunch (the engineers). Engineers liked the Unix operating system, and the fact that they could get under the hood with a PC. Mac users really didn't want to get under the hood, they just wanted it to work like their mind worked. It was all about easy User Interface vs. freedom to manhandle your computing environment.

One thing was for certain. Macs were much more expensive to buy, up to twice as much more. So most people early on got PCs and pirated software. (Or, as a blip on the radar of computer history, remember the NEXT computer? Some people were buying these hoping to avoid the whole war altogether.)

From Just Pretty to Pretty Useful

However, what Macs did have is the fun side of work. I used to go to the Art and Architecture building to use their computers because they had MacPaint and some other neat graphic software. And on Central Campus they had just gotten a digitizing tablet, so the nights when I couldn't sleep I went there and played with that. Furthermore, if you recall the problem of having to cut and paste graphs and charts into your documents, Macs began to get software that was pretty phenomenal. FrameMaker 1.0, and PageMaker. Both did pretty much the same thing, but I couldn't figure out how to use PageMaker back then. It was kind of an odd concept (until later when I learned more about graphic design and paste-up). FrameMaker wasn't necessarily easy to use, but I found the user manual in the engineering computer labs and used that to do the thesis for my 6 credit independent study. It wasn't easy, as I said, but for the first time in my experience with computers, it presented the ability to merge the creation of graphs, charts and illustrations with plain, boring, text.

The desktop publishing revolution had begun!

PCs Come of Age

I keyed in on this early on, and as karma had it, I came across an article by a woman who had written that this was going to be the next big thing in the world, and investors ought to get on board quickly if they wanted to make some money on it. I had no money to invest, but I was smart enough to know a good thing when I saw one, so with all the experience I had with Macs during college, I pressed my dad with the idea that I needed a computer, and when he agreed, I set out to find one. Unfortunately, back then it was like the wild west, there were no real places to get a computer, most were being built by storefront shops, and the prices were steadily going up.

The advent of computer magazine publishing really spurred on a lot of interest in PC sales. Byte had been around for years, and was the real geek's choice, but PC Magazine began a kind of revolution to bring PCs to the masses. Computer Shopper magazine, which was used to be about 1.5 to 2 inches thick back then, was basically a gigantic catalog of all kind of boutique "clone" shops (as in IBM clones) and I used to buy it each month not only to find deals, but to actually learn more about computer hardware. Eventually, my first PC was built by a friend of the family, and it was with that that I learned how to use PageMaker to it's fullest. At that time PageMaker was on version 4, and it had broken out of the Mac environment, and onto PCs, because of the introduction of the Windows operating environment, which finally afforded a more graphical user interface that Mac users had enjoyed for so long. I started using Windows at the 3.1 version, but OS2 was also available, and some people were opting for that.

The problem was that it was difficult to choose, as even back then people were concerned about which OS would win out. Macs were selling well, but mostly to the graphic arts industry. Businesses didn't need graphics, and architects however, needed computing power, so MSDOS CAD on a PC was their weapon of choice. Eventually, of course, MSDOS got left behind for good. Oh wait, no. It's still in Windows, isn't it? Anyway...

Other graphics programs were also being introduced for PCs, like Corel Draw (vector illustration program), and (in my opinion) it's lesser competitor Canvas which allowed both bitmap and vector editing in one program. Photoshop was still in its nascent stages, perhaps version 1 or 2, but only available for Macs.