Masonry Magazine December 1993 Page. 24
COMPUTERS FOR CONTRACTORS
Buying A Computer
A comparison of Apple versus PC Compatible systems, and a recommended minimum configuration.
By LARRY WENDT
Co-founder, RMI Computer Group
I KNOW I'm going to make someone mad here, so I might as well apologize right from the beginning. In this column, I'm going to address purchasing a computer for your business. If I give my opinion based on what I know about a mason contractor's office and provide some useful, concrete (no pun intended) information, I'm sure to get someone who has already bought a computer irritated because I don't agree with their choice. Sorry!
I'm going to begin by separating incompatible types of computers into four broad categories. By incompatible types, I mean computers that cannot, in general, share hardware or software (reference May/June 1993 issue of MASONRY for a definition of hardware and software).
Mainframe and Supercomputers. These are the very biggest computers-the type that can take up an entire room. You would need a million dollars or more to buy one and a full-time staff just to play a game of checkers with one of these monsters.
Mini-Computers: The popular IBM AS-400 falls into this category. The big problem here is the cost of equipment maintenance and the pricing and availability of software. Additionally, the future for mini-computer technology looks dismal.
Workstations: Workstations are mid-sized computers that are very fast with state-of-the-art hardware. These computers excel at technical and graphical applications rather than business applications. The software choices for these machines is very limited.
Personal Computers (PCs): This is the small, desktop size, computer that most people are familiar with. While most of the above computers are meant to handle a number of users (or terminals) at once, a PC is dedicated to a single user. A PC is, by far, the easiest and least expensive computer to use.
The PC is the obvious choice from the above categories. But what about the choice between a Macintosh (an Apple computer) and an IBM PC Compatible personal computer?
A little background here.
The personal computer was invented in 1976 by Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. The design was based on a novel concept of bringing digital computing power down to a small, personal scale. They went on to found the Apple Corporation. In 1991, IBM introduced their own version of a personal computer. It was deliberately and completely incompatible with the Apple computers. None of the monitors, printers, disk drives, accessories or software used by the IBM could be interchanged with the Apple.
Both Apple and IBM tried to keep their PC designs proprietary and protected. Apple has been largely successful in this by keeping a large staff of lawyers very busy. However, IBM let their proprietary design slip through their fingers and now there are dozens of PC manufacturers using the same basic IBM design for their own machines. A PC that is based on the IBM architecture is referred to as PC Compatible.
The net effect from all this is that Apple has a much smaller share of the PC market, about fourteen percent in 1991, (Standard & Poors Industry Surveys, Dec. 31, 1992) and the consumer pays a premium price for Apple products. Second, because of the larger user base, there are many more software choices for PC Compatible computers than there are for the Apple. And finally, all of the software that I have seen specifically for mason contractors is PC Compatible and totally incompatible with the Apple.
As far as I can see, it simply is no contest. The best value for hardware and the best opportunity to find genuinely useful software is to go with a PC Compatible (IBM compatible) computer.
The amount of work that can be Continued on Page 42
General Computer Concepts
A UNIT TO MEASURE information in a computer is the byte. A byte is a single "character" that a computer can store and manipulate. The alphabet, "ABC... XYZ" is composed of 26 characters. For instance, the word "BRICK" represents 5 bytes of information, the phrase "2 SCAFFOLD FRAMES" is 17 bytes long counting the spaces. (Numbers that are added, subtracted, multiplied and divided are handled slightly differently than this, but the concept is the same.)
1,024, loosely referred to as a "thousand", bytes as a unit is called a kilobyte and is often designated with K or Kb. 1,048,576, a "million", bytes as a unit is called a megabyte and is often designated with Meg or Mb. The number 2 is an important number in the computer world since personal computers base all computations on a two-number system of 0 and 1, and these odd unit sizes results from the use of the powers of 2. Hence, it is natural (at least to a computer) that 1,024= 2¹⁰= 1Kb and 1,048,576= 2²⁰= 1Mb.
24 MASONRY-NOVEMBER/DECEMBER, 1993