March 2007

Letters

Continued from page 1

By TR Readers

Uninspiring Vista
It's a shame that writer Erika Jonietz has only now discovered that "Macs are simple" ("Uninspiring Vista," January/­February 2007). I discovered this in 1984, when they first came out.

Many people in the academic and business communities still wonder why this discovery has been, and continues to be, so elusive and rare. I turned on my first Mac, opened Macword, and was working productively in five minutes. That has been my standard ever since. Around 1991, one could put together a LAN with Macs and printers just by plugging wires together. On a PC system, it took full-time administrative personnel to set up and keep such a system running. In 1991 and 1992 I worked in two different offices with networked PC systems, and no one at either place could tell me how to print in landscape format from Lotus 1-2-3. I had to print in portrait format, cut out and tape the pieces together, and put them on a copy machine to get the format I needed. No such antics were ever needed on a Mac.
Daniel Whitney
Cambridge, MA

Correction: In the January/February 2007 essay "The Alchemist," we inaccurately described the Institute of Food Technologists, which is a scientific society made up of 22,000 members working in academia, government, and the food industry.

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