May 86 Letters
Volume Number: 2
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Letters & Opinion
Labels, Corrections, Book Reviews & Update List
Hot Air: The Editor's ViewPoint
Why Macintosh is Not a Business Computer
The Macintosh is a manager's computer. It was designed by middle managers, for
other middle managers. It functions best in an environment where a large amount of
numbers must be tracked and sorted in a spreadsheet with Excel or, for more technical
needs, TK! Solver, plotted with Chart, pasted into reports with Word or MacWrite, and
typeset for presentation with Pagemaker, MacPublisher or Ready-Set-Go. Where the
data comes from is not the concern of the middle manager. He is only interested in
making sense of the information, and in that, the Macintosh, with it's user interface and
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get graphics is unsurpassed. I myself have used the Mac
this way while working for Hughes Aircraft. I took transistor test data from the
integrated circuit production line and extracted modeling parameters with TK! Solver,
plotted trend lines with Chart, and reported on production control versus IC
performance with MacWrite and Pagemaker. A typical middle manager's job. But this
has nothing to do with running a small business.
To run a small business, you need to be concerned with more mundane things in
life. Like entering a customer order, printing an invoice and packing slip, notifying the
customer that the red widget will ship this week, the blue widget is backordered until
next month, and the yellow widget will ship a week from Tuesday. Then you have to
make sure the shipping department gets all that straight! There is no Mac software
presently on the market that can adequately keep track of the three widgets from the
order entry clerk to the shipping clerk, invoice, packing slip, and all! That application
needs the now infamous file server product that Apple never figured out how to make.
One of the things you need to keep track of widget shipping and customer orders
is plenty of disk storage with daily back-up. Presently there are few hard disks on the
market that meet this need. First of all, you need a SCSI drive that is reliable. And all
the SCSI drive manufacturers are too busy debugging Apple's software drivers, and
issuing weekly file system software upgrades to take time out to sell their products.
However, two drives which may be worth while when the software settles (I advise
waiting at least three months), are the AST drive on the high end and the LoDown drive
on the bottom end. Both are SCSI drives, with tape back-up capability. The LoDown
drive comes in 20, 40 and 80 megabytes with tape units in 20 or 60 megabyte units
and the prices are very reasonable. Contact them at (415) 426-1747. The AST drive
is a cadallac unit of 75 megabytes and a built-in tape unit. But it's not cheap! Contact
them at (714) 863-1333.The Apple drive, and other internal drives like the Micah
and Hyperdrive are great for those middle managers we talked about, but no
businessman is going to be fool enough to put his customer base, the lifeblood of his
business, on an internal drive without back-up and throw the Mac into the car! No, a
hard disk needs to be gently laid to rest in a quiet corner of the office, protected from
earthquake, flood, fire and small children. And backed up daily. Apple's hard disk
product doesn't cut it for this type of use.
But does it do labels?
But enough of all this. Let's take an even more mundane and simple example. The
most basic need of any business is to print out a mailing label. This the Macintosh cannot
do. The Mac can print in any font, style, size. It can include graphics, produce typeset
quality output, you name it. This entire issue of MacTutor was printed on the Mac! But
it can't print four lines of simple text, hour after hour. And who can run a small
business without mailing labels? Let's look at this example in depth. First you need a
printer. Apple doesn't have one. The Imagewriter printer had no tractors to handle the
labels correctly without jamming. Every month, we had to dig at least one label out of
the inner workings of the thing. They didn't even have the decency to design the roller
so that it could be removed for gummed up label removal! The best tool for the job
turns out to be one of those flexible nail files your secretary probably has in her
purse.
The Imagewriter II has made a small attempt to improve the situation. It has
what might be described as micky-mouse tractors. They are at least better than nothing!
But the labels still must pass around the roller, which causes them to peel. And worse of
all, the metal band that holds the paper against the roller is so tight that it is
impossible for the labels to back up out of the printer. Thus the only way to remove the
labels when your done is to do it surgically by cutting the labels below the print head,
and moving the labels forward.
That leaves the Laserwriter, which isn't worth mentioning because it can't do
labels without manual feed. And even if you could find labels that would feed from the
tray, you would waste half the labels since all the Mac software available only prints
labels one up if they print labels at all. But even in manual feed, the labels sometimes
jam up under the rollers that heat-set the toner to the paper. And a gummed up
LaserWriter is of much more concern than an imagewriter! I've had it happen just
enough to know never to try to do labels on the one piece of equipment that MacTutor
cannot do without.
So let's ignore the hardware problem for the moment. What application do you
use? The first program was Mail Manager, written by some guy in Germany and
distributed by SofTech. The problem is, the guy wrote software for the Mac like it was
an Apple II. He ignored the toolbox guidelines, coded specific machine dependent
routines so that the program needed an update to run on the 512K Macs, and then
another update to run on the Mac Plus. Well, SofTech managed to get the 512K Mac
upgrade out as version 1.1, but by the time of the Mac Plus, SofTech had gone out of
business, so goodby future upgrades! The product won't work on HFS systems, and is
frustrating in its design anyway.
The other mail list program is Bulk Mailer. While this seems at least workable,
it too suffers from a frustrating lack of flexibility that makes it a poor choice. No, the
only real solution is a data base program. But none of them do labels correctly. And none
of them do anything other than one up labels. Still, FileMaker is without question the
best data base program on the market, so we went with that one. It is easy to use, works
reliably with the LaserWriter and Mac Plus and doesn't require you to learn reformed
Egytptian! FileMaker follows the Apple guidelines to the letter, which when it comes to
labels, brings us to the print driver problem.
My Kingdom for a Printer Driver!
It is obvious the Mac was designed to print term papers, not mailing labels.
When a print file is opened, quickdraw commands entered, and the file then closed, the
Mac supposedly composes and prints the desired page. In other words, printing on the
Mac is page oriented. Someone along the way decided that after a page is printed, the next
page should be brought up ready to print, so someone in the bowls of the ROM issues a
page break. On the imagewriter, this advances the paper to the top of the next page. But
when you do labels, you don't want a page advance. So, in the new imagewriter drivers,
someone put a check box to turn off the page break. Ever watch the imagewriter print?
It goes ahead and does the page break anyway and then finds the no page break box
checked, so it backs up to the top of the page. But you can't back up mailing labels in
the imagewriter without inviting a jam eventually. Catch-22!
Of course the answer is that Apple simply does not make a business printer. The
imagewriter is only good for a base for the thunderscan device and the LaserWriter is a
superb but expensive typesetter. Apple has no mundane business printer. So the
solution is to buy another printer, like a NEC 8810 or some other letter quality
printer with large, reliable tractors, and bottom feed that moves the labels in a
straight line past the print head. But how do you get it to talk to the Macintosh?
Assimilation Process produces a printer driver modification called the Daisy Wheel
Connection that patches the Imagewriter file to work with various business printers.
But what do you suppose happens when the Imagewriter driver front end does it's silly
page break, back-up routine? Of course the command to back-up the imagewriter is not
the same command to back-up anybody else's printer, and the result is the page break
is inserted into the middle of your label printing causing the label alignment to get off.
I have found that when using Filemaker, the only solution is to not check the no page
break box at all. Then, if you use 1.5 inch labels, and select international fanfold,
behold, like magic, you get a page break exactly equal to the width of a single label,
allowing you to print labels correctly, as long as you don't mind getting seven labels and
one blank label per page. A mere waste of 12% of your labels! And such is how this
issue of MacTutor was mailed. I rest my case. The Macintosh can't print labels. And if it
can't do the most mundane of all business tasks, it can hardly be called a business
computer. But I'm sure it will do a great job of preparing a report for the Editorial
board on how much time and money I've spent trying to get labels printed this month!
The MacTutor Solution
The real solution lies in alternative print drivers. What we need is a variety of
print drivers that can be installed from the Chooser desk accessory that can handle a
variety of printing needs. When you need mailing labels, you select a label driver that
prints labels in draft mode correctly without this page break nonsense. When you do
typesetting, you select the LaserWriter driver. When you need some other type of
printing, you select the driver best suited for the application. In otherwords, the