Windows Debate
John,
I haven't tried to program Microsoft Windows, but I'll tell you, from a
user's perspective, the Amiga is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH easier to use. Case in
point:
At work we upgraded from PageMaker 3.0 with run-time 286 Windows to
PageMaker 3.01 (for Windows 3.0) and a full version of Windows 3.0. It
wouldn't print. Why? We called Aldus, and they said it was Windows. We
called MicroSoft, and they couldn't get it to print, but we discovered the
problem was in downloading soft fonts to a network spooler – LANtastic, to
be specific. LANtastic isn't included on the list of Microsoft Windows
networks. So we called Lantastic, received a Fax 20 pages long configuring
Windows. We then upgraded the soft fonts, Bitstream, to Bitstream 3.0 for
Windows and reinstalled EVERYTHING. Twice. So I looked over the WIN.INI
file, and found a line that said "sfdlbat=D:\FONTS\SFLPT1.BAT" No such BAT
file existed, and I called MicroSoft again, and they said they didn't know
exactly what the BATCH file did, but that it didn't matter. They could get
their machines to work with a different type of softfonts, and told me to
increase my printer timeouts to 100 and 200 (I'd already tried with 300
and 600, but the tech wouldn't believe me) He also said that I should try
calling Hewlett Packard, because they wrote the printer driver. By this
time, I'd installed it on my own machine for testing. When it still didn't
work, I called Bitstream, and they could answer my questions, and we
managed to get it to print, eventually, and it worked on my machine (I
needed to use a smaller character set than ANSI Windows and I needed to set
up the printer to ignore Tabs and swallow 8 bits without interpretation).
So, I installed it on the original machine, and guess what? It DIDN'T
work. So I disconnected the printer from the network since it was local
anyway, and changed the port from LPT1.PRN (which works on my machine–per
instructions from LANtastic) to just LPT1 and it worked, so just for the
heck of it, I reinstalled the printer on the
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