Although I had worked entirely with DOS computers, I discovered a MacIntosh Classic sitting on my desk when I moved to Okanagan University College three years ago. Since my wife owns an identical computer, I quickly adopted the Mac for most of my everyday work, and admired its user-friendly interface and graphics capability. Nevertheless, for specialised work I continued to rely on a variety of DOS-based applications. The advent of the PowerPC promised an opportunity to run all of my software on a single machine.
Arrival of the first PowerPCs has been heralded by a barrage of attention from the computer press (Byte - April 1994; Macworld - Feb. 1994; PC/Computing - Feb. 1994). The PowerPCs chips are the first based on RISC architecture and are faster and less expensive than existing chips. Native applications are reputed to run two to six times faster on PowerPC-based machines than comparable programs on Intel's Pentium CPU. PowerMacs are already available using the 601 chip, and a series of other chips in the PowerPC family will soon be introduced. Emulation software (SoftWindows) has been quickly introduced, allowing PowerMacs to run DOS- and Windows-based programs.
I recently visited the Future Shop, laden with TILIA, TILIA·Graph, CANOCO, and WACALIB to test a new PowerMac 6100CD 160 equipped with 16 MB of RAM and SoftWindows. The PowerMac successfully ran all of these programs under SoftWindows emulation, and I was very impressed with the performance with a couple of exceptions:
1) With TILIA·Graph I could not (of course) find a display option for the PowerMac's monitor. I believe I selected "Super VGA". Although this worked well, I could not view the very bottom of the diagrams. (Since then, Eric Grimm has suggested that I would probably have been better off selecting "VGA".)
2) The emulation seemed a little slow. I only found this frustrating when I tried a Monte Carlo permutation test of the First Canonical Axis at the end of my CANOCO run. My initial attempt indicated that 999 permutations might have required several hours to run. (I understand that a MacIntosh version of CANOCO is available, and this might provide a solution).
When running TILIA, I was initially surprised that the MacIntosh had no ALT-key, but soon discovered that the option key performs the same function, providing access to the menus.
The opportunity to easily transfer graphics, data, text, etc. among DOS, Windows, and Mac Programs is another potential advantage of the PowerMac.
I was able easily to copy a TILIA·Graph plot into the MacIntosh Scrapbook, but I soon discovered that the store had not equipped the PowerMac with any MacIntosh graphics programs and was not connected to a printer, so I could not complete my tests.
The new PowerMac is impressive for its software flexibility, and certainly for the speed at which it can run native applications. This flexibility does sacrifice computational speed when DOS- and Windows-based applications must be run under emulation. With this experience, I am still considering the PowerMac. I will probably wait at least until autumn, when the first machines equipped with the faster PowerPC 604 chips arrive.