David: agreed... been down that road many times myself... 1st mac was for work in 1985-86 when I was publishing a small newspaper... replace all of our photo-typesetting equipment with several Macs, a LaserWriter, a huge 20-meg (lol) serial ext. HD, and a site license for TOPS networking software over regular twisted pair phone wire... that led to me being featured in Dec. 1987 MacWorld and eventually got me out of newspapers and into technical publishing, etc.
Every place I worked from mid 80s into the mid/late 90s featured a struggle between using the mac as a publishing platform vs. entrenched IT resistance.
In fact, this is the first job I've had since '85 where I was not allowed to use a mac (at other jobs, I was known to bring my own mac plus, SE-30, etc. to word each day and then back home -- even going so far as to buy 2nd keyboards, mice, cables, etc. so I only had to cart the little beige or whatever CPU with me -- even used to take them as carry-on luggage in the 80s)...
When I took this job, I was told I could use a mac if I made a case for it... but no matter what, IT was determined to prevent non-execs from having macs around... I actually like and respect our IT guy even though he's been a real dick about me getting a mac -- I've even helped him straighten out some network and other IT issues, and to be fair, he's not a huge Windows fan, preferring UNIX... but we are a licensed reseller of Windows systems to our customers and our software group are diehard Windows folk, so our proprietary control and monitoring data acquisition software only runs on Windows... that software is a key critical component of everything we sell (except to PBR, who insist that we use their proprietary software and jump through hoops to make it work with our monitoring/control hardware...
Sorry for the ramble, but realized only now while writing this post that this was indeed the first time in over 20-some years I was forced to use Windows full time at work (I'd had other jobs that required using DOS, PICK, UNIX, etc. machines to test client software and document it, but I did my job on macs).
Jim |
