Easily the best school/home/personal computer from that period was the BBC model B computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Model_B

It reigned supreme over Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, Orics, Sinclair ZX81/Spectrums, TI-99/4As, Dragons etc.

When Bill Gates was shown the machine and its Econet network capabilities he replied 'Whats a network?'

95% wrong, but 5% useful information. The only devices that I've run into ANY trouble with immediate plug-and-play functionality on a Mac have been GPS devices. No camera problems, no printer problems, no scanner problems - not even a problem with All-in-one print/scan/faxers.

That said, before you buy ANY technology, read up on it.

Is this the computer which has BBC Basic on it? One of my coworkers swears the only sw language anyone ever needs is BBC Basic.

- Eric

While it has gotten easier in the last few years I still find hardware that macs don't like. That same hardware now is the ones that linux doesn't like either. I've found that linux recognizes almost as much as the ma does now with the exception being apple hardware that apple intentionally makes that way.
Funny I bought a dvd burner and an external usb case and plugged into my linux system and it recognized with no problem. Plugged into my wife's xp laptop and I had to pull out a drive cd for the drive and a driver cd for the usb case then dvd burning software so three discs before xp could use it. The tables have really turned. My mother in law was whining the other day that her desktop pc doesn't work anymore, it won't boot, windows is all messed up. She didn't ask me to fix it this time though, I get on her about going to sites that want to load crappy adware like aol or yahoo but she still goes there and installs everything they ask.

The BBC computer did have the BBC BASIC on it, which was widely recognised as being so much better than the Microsoft BASIC versions on the other early 1980s machines. The BBC model B was interface rich compared to the other computers and was excellent for using the computer for mechantronics projects i.e. simple robotics and scientific experimental recording and for control systems implementations.

You can download a BBC model B emulator here at

http://modelb.bbcmicro.com/download.html

and get the games here at

http://www.bbcmicrogames.com/acornsoft.html

At school we had at first the Apple IIs (at school I designed an 8 bit ADC interfaced on to a 6522 PIO for the Apple IIs backplane for digitising voice input for voice activated control - which required some 6502 hand coded machine code; mind control at that time was a bit beyond what we could do - Firefox (the movie) had just been released a year or two earlier), but then moved on BBC model Bs. The local Russian Spies were aquiring their Sinclair Spectrums made just up the road for their aerospace defence or perhaps they wanted their children to play computer games as well

The BBC BASIC was very good to use to go on to develop early structured programming skills. BBC BASIC also had a complete built in 6502 assembler as well. It was a good introduction before going on to program in PASCAL (taught on Apollo Domains at University) and later C and OCCAM and a little FORTRAN for signal processing projects i.e. Dynamic Infra Red image processing. Borlands Turbo BASIC was pretty good for MSDOS programming.

I mostly lost interest in the bloated and tedious C++ Object Oriented Windows (OCCAMs process oriented programming still hasn't caught on yet and I suspect most modern Information Technologists and even programmers involved in that game wouldn't even begin to tell you how even the basics of a computer works).

I should have went into the games development side of things and I would have have probably now been a Multi millionaire like Davy Jones of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto fame. Oh well..

Hi Sue,

We changed from PCs to Macs at work a little over a year ago. Although it took a little while to adjust, it's been a good decision. They generally are faster and easier and you don't have to reboot every few hours. When you do reboot, they do so much faster. PCs are much more vulnerable to viruses and hacking and the anti-virus software that you must have slows the machine down.

I was reluctant to make the change but now I'm much happier. I still have a PC at home and would like to change to a Mac on my next upgrade. I can't now because my DW must have a PC to work from home. Macs aren't perfect, but they'll probably reduce his suffering.

Macs will run Windows, sometimes better than other computers, without much hassle. I use VMware Fusion to occasionally run XP but there are other viable options. Go on, get a Mac at home!

Not everyone has the same level of experience and training with computers so there are going to be lots of differences in opinion and some unintentional mistakes made. To mildly misquote a wise person "never attribute to malice (or fanboyism) what is adequately explained by ignorance".

It is possible to write malicious software for any computer system / operating system. Having said that, the basic architecture of Windows (at least thru XP) is much more vulnerable to true Viruses or worms when compared to Linux, UNIX and OS-X.

MS Windows is a much more target rich environment (more common and therefore more targets and more badguys) but the other platforms are not ignored - there are lots of attempts to show how "vulnerable" Linux and OS-X are but to date the worst the various teams have managed are some demo's that might work under very controlled conditions. I am pretty sure there are no current Apple or Linux specific exploits "in the wild" that are equivalent to the worms and viruses currently impacting a lot of PCs. To someone who is a more casual user that surely looks like "there are no mac viruses".

I am always at a bit of a loss when people bring up Anti-virus SW for the mac as indicating that Apples must have viruses. Most of these companies are out to make a buck not help the users. Many of the "viruses" they scan for haven't been a threat to the Mac in a long time (as in no longer matter with the current OS) assuming they ever were a realistic threat. The other things they seem to scan for are application vulnerabilities (like Flash, or Adobe acrobat reader) which are not exactly Apples responsibility. This is also where some of the architectural choices behind OS-X are better at limiting the impact of the malware than the same exploit on Windows.

In many cases the recent "viruses" aren't really true viruses but require a social exploit also - having the user do something specific to catch and share the "fun". In my experience those who fall for these things will continue to do so and there is very little I or the OS designers can do to help these people. Currently this is mostly Windows users (due to population size) but I expect we will see more of this on other platforms as they grow in popularity.

- Eric

Well, again, kinda sorta true. First of all, there's plenty of know vulnerabilities in OS X, it's just that they aren't really that easy to exploit.

What's more important is the underlying guts of the OS X platform, which is, of course, a BSD-based kernel and it is, ultimately, Unix. That's an OLD and MATURE OS and a lot of the attacks and issues faced are well known and well patched.

The biggest security vulnerability for ANY computer is the peripheral that's located smack in between the screen and the chair.