Fourth Quarter, 1997

The End?

This last year has been a trying time for Mac users in general, and ASACMUG in particular. A few years after a company-wide directive banning Mac purchases, the remaining Macs in AES/Torrance have finally been phased out, starting with the old Mac IIci's and the last Macs we've purchased - Centris 650's. I have heard of similar tales at our sister site in Phoenix. Only a couple of departments continue as a beacon for cost-effective and powerful computing, buying the latest 9600/350 machines.

The remaining Mac users (at least 60) were switched to Pentium PCs running NT 4.0 or HP Unix workstations. At least those with Unix workstations still have an option to run their Mac software and use old data files, since a conversion to Wintel is still problematic (no equivalent applications, short filenames, version incompatibilities).

As a premier company, we only react to the market as a whole, and Apple has suffered badly across the board, not only in Fortune 500 companies, but in their strongholds of education and publishing. Mac fans can only hope that Apple recovers some lost ground during 1998 - evangelistas can only do so much.

Apple's current woes notwithstanding, ASACMUG is still going strong, transforming itself from business-and-office issues to one of home and personal computing. We recommend systems for home use and getting the most of your MacOS investment. We hope to continue in such a capacity for the foreseeable future. Please drop by and say hello.

Alex Morando
Newsletter Editor

The Meeting

Here is an ASCII rendition of the meeting place for MacWorld Expo.
The meeting time is January 6, 1998 between 1:00-1:15 pm

 

             *   North to                      
            ***  Market St.                    
           * * *                               
     +----*--*--*-----------------------------+
     |  **   *   **                           |
     |       *                                |
     |       *                                |
     |       *      North Moscone             |
     |                                        |
     +----||---||---||---||---||----||---||---+
                                               
      meet here!!                              
         *                                     
     +---*||---||---||---||---||----||---||---+
     | * * *                                  |
     | *****       South Moscone              |
     |   *                                    |
     |  +--||----------||-||-----------||--+  |
     |--|  ||          || ||           ||  |--|
     |--|  ||          || ||           ||  |--|
     |--|  ||          || ||Escalators ||  |--|
     |--|  ||          || ||to show    ||  |--|
     |--|  ||          || ||floor      ||  |--|
     |--|  ||          || ||           ||  |--|
     |                                        |
     |                                        |
     |                                        |
     +----------------------------------------+