On 23/10/2007, at 10:22 AM, Severin Crisp wrote:
Martin, I was a staff member in Physics at UWA at the time you
mention and that department took Macs on board very willingly.
Absolutely - many university departments and schools certainly jumped
at the Mac - it was the Mac Plus lab in the school of Engineering
that triggered my interest in Macs back then. And those mysterious
Lisa and Macintosh XL systems hidden in one of the upstairs areas
were amazing! :-) Macs were just out of reach of the majority of
my student friends who were all more interested in the Atari ST,
Amiga and IBM PC anyway.
Most computing then was done centrally at WARC which had moved from
the IBM 1620 through the DEC-10 into the CD Cyber era and Physics
even had a remote teletype into that system! A number of research
experiments had dedicated DEC PDP-11 and similar machines strapped
to experiments for control, data collection and processing running
almost exclusively Fortran.
Yeah, I remember sending email and reading newsgroups in 1985 on the
Vax-11/750 in Electrical Engineering. Programming at the unix
command line almost turned me off computers before I encountered the
Mac lab in 2nd year! :-)
From memory the Crystallography Centre branched out into SUN
workstations and Physics equipped our office with Macs and a laser
printer, all in the late 1980s. My own first Mac was bought
through UWA for my home and was a 128k Mac in a smart carry case
with a rudimentary Imagewriter and my memory was that the price was
just under $2000, the date is vague.
My Dad bought the bigger Imagewriter 15" with our 512k Mac (which we
quickly upgraded to the 512k ED) and floppy so it cost a fair bit
more than that. The figure of $8,000 for the Mac II and 13" Apple
RGB monitor is indelibly etched on my brain as it was my life savings
(plus a loan from Dad!) at the time and I paid in cash!! Let me tell
you carrying that amount of cash in my pocket was one scary thing to
do! Man I still remember opening the box it came in - I still have
the Mac II (20 years later). :-)
It was followed by an SE30, a really great machine!, a MacII and a
progression from then on both for home and on campus. The original
128k was upgraded to a MacPlus and given 4MB of memory and finally
went to a WAMUG member whose name escapes me who was creating a Mac
archive museum. Macs quickly went into Physics staff offices, as
well as the Departmental Office, as well as teaching labs, all
networked, and only later did PCs proliferate alongside them.
Memory fails me as to the details of time but largely through Macs
Physics quickly took on board the idea that every staff member
should have a networked computer on the desk and this was more or
less achieved prior to my retirement in 1994.
This household in Albany now runs three Macs, this G5 which more or
less never sleeps, a G3iMac and a MacBook, recently acquired and
wireless networked and which no doubt contributed to the 17% sales
figure. On the proselyting side, one son whose work is PC based
now has an Intel iMac as part of his elaborate setup and my other
son, also PC based at work and at home, will shortly buy a wireless
based Intel iMac system for all his home entertainment.
May the figures continue to rise; Viva Steve and his fellows!
Severin Crisp
On 23/10/2007, at 9:22 AM, Martin Hill wrote:
On 22/10/2007, at 11:19 PM, Alex wrote:
I may be wrong but I believe that Macs were sold at UWA in the
70s for basically close to cost to students. Obviously, Macs
were really popular for that reason and because they were so far
ahead of Windows at that time.
I was a student at UWA during the first few years after the Mac's
release in 1984 and at the time they were still very expensive
even with the education discount - trust me on this. My family
bought an educ discount 512k Mac, dot-matrix Imagewriter and
external 400k floppy drive for around $4,000 in 1985 from the
Apple uni consortium shop at UWA and my Mac II with 1MB of RAM,
twin floppies and no hard disk cost me $8,000 in 1987 also from
UWA. After kicking Steve Jobs out, John Sculley and Jean Louise
Gasse for most of those years followed a very premium pricing
policy which made them FAR more expensive than the competition.
However, this great strategy by Apple did not seem to translate
into the "real" world where businesses were sold on Windows.
Could this have been caused by Apple's pricing policy outside of
the Uni environment? I would have thought that the students
going out into the business world would drag Apple with them.
Even at the height of Mac popularity, I never saw anything on
campus at UWA or Curtin like the interest students, the general
population and my fellow Windows-indoctrinated colleagues are now
showing in Macs. In the latest uni student survey below, Apple is
second only to Dell with 23% owning Macs but the figures regarding
intent to purchase are mind-boggling: 44% say their next machine
will be a Mac. I was founding vice president of the University
Macintosh Users Club (UMUC) based at UWA from around 1985-87 and
interest amongst fellow students was *never* remotely in that league.
Is the latest upswing for Apple a case of riding on the coattail
of the iPod, which was a masterstroke of design & invention?
The free iPod with every Mac purchase has undoubtedly helped in
the education market, but a multiplicity of other factors have
also contributed: the move to intel and subsequent Boot Camp and
virtualisation compatibility which reduces the perceived risk of
switching close to zero, the plethora of "alpha geeks" and
prominent bloggers who have switched, the backlash from Vista's
problematic debut, the safe harbour from malware of the Mac
platform, as well as more reasonable pricing etc.
Here's more detail on the Student survey:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/10/22/apple.second.with.students/
"Apple No. 2 behind Dell in student PC survey
SurveyU.com recently surveyed one thousand students about which
computer they relied on for their schoolwork. According to the
survey, Dell is the most popular, with Apple coming in second, but
the results show that Apple is poised to take first place. With 23
percent of the vote, Apple is ten points behind Dell, but
maintains a seven point lead on the next runner-up, Hewlett-
Packard, even when taking into account the PC manufacturer's
daughter companies -- Compaq and VooDoo. Apple has a large lead,
however, in the other polled statistics, with 44 percent of
students saying their next machine would be an Apple, and more
than 80 percent of Apple users bought their computers through the
company's student program. Dell took second place in those
particular categories, with only 21 percent saying that they would
subsequently by a Dell and 30 percent saying their purchased their
computer through the student discount program. respectively.
"One of the things that Apple and Dell have going for them,
according to the survey, is a well-designed student purchase
program, whereas the other manufacturers -- HP, Acer, Toshiba,
Sony, and all of their subsidiaries -- lack a solid program.
"SurveyU.com found that a typical US college student spends an
average of $1290, and that the students were biased towards cost-
effective, consumer-grade laptops, with four out of five students
owning a portable computer versus a desktop model.
"Apple's "secret" weapon in the race to be number one in education
rests on the shoulders of the venerable iPod, SurveyU.com
discovers. Thanks to the recent iPod promotion -- where students
who bought a new Mac would receive a iPod nano -- Apple has gained
a lot of market share and only stands to gain more, according to
statistics. This, together with iTunes U and the newly announced
"Beyond Campus", has shown how deeply committed Apple is to the
collective student body."
-Mart
------------------------------------
Martin Hill
email: mart "at" ozmac.com
homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com
Mb: 0401-103-194 hm: (08)9314-5242
------------------------------------
Martin Hill
email: mart "at" ozmac.com
homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com
Mb: 0401-103-194 hm: (08)9314-5242
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________________________________________________________
Assoc Professor R Severin Crisp, FIP, CPhys, FAIP
15 Thomas St, Mount Clarence, Albany, 6330, Western Australia.
Phone (08) 9842 1950 (Int'l +61 8 9842 1950)
email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________
------------------------------------
Martin Hill
email: mart "at" ozmac.com
homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com
Mb: 0401-103-194 hm: (08)9314-5242
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