Cyrillic database for Mac

[James Kirchner]

On Tue, Sept. 5, 1995, Robert Beard wrote:

>If that is true, certainly uninformed diatribes against
>particular computer systems should be saved for other places.

He then goes on to make a somewhat uninformed statement himself:

>Anyone about to purchase a Mac should also remember that
>only PCs are used in the Slavic nations...

I don't know about the other Slavic nations, but Apple had established a
pretty visible presence in the Czech Republic by the time I left that country
last October.  (In fact, people even use Amigas there.)  To be sure, the
majority of the computers in operation there are PCs, but at least two of the
companies I translated for, when I lived in West Bohemia, used Macs; one of
them for general use, the other for most of their print production and
architectural design needs.  Of the two major Czech dailies now on the World
Wide Web, both are available in Macintosh CE format.  All of the independent,
Czech-developed word-processing programs I saw there had the capability of
importing and exporting Macintosh files.

Rekshynskyj's claims were not exaggerated, as far as the operating systems
were concerned.  Apple has entire, up-to-date Polish, Czech and Russian
operating systems installed on the Macintoshes sold in their respective
countries, and available free from ftp.apple.com (parts can even be extracted
for customization of the US system, as I did with my own).  The existence of
these localized operating systems was quite an advantage, from what I could
see, since in a country where even camera instruction booklets are seldom
translated, these OS's made it much easier and faster for the considerable
number of non-English-proficient (and non-DOS-proficient) local users to
reach some level of productivity on the computer.  (The language problem also
made complete hardware information harder to get for those trying to get
their PC systems up and running.  This can be a hard enough problem for
native English speakers, even when they've bought a packaged system.)  The
lack of a localized OS for PC's actually seemed like quite a boon to Czech
software developers, who did a good bit of business in their own -- rather
good -- DOS-compatible, Windows-simulating -- software (e.g., MAT, Klasik)
for users who couldn't, or didn't want to work with English- or
German-language programs.

Despite the fact that only about 20% of computers in use are Macs (which are,
by the way, also present to a small extent at Czech universities), that's
still enough to make Apple, according to some trade magazines, the world's
largest computer manufacturer.  With new Macintoshes now capable of running
both their own and PC platforms, some of the major applications programs now
operating cross-platform, and with conjectures about even IBM possibly
joining the small rank of companies cloning Mac machines (maybe that's where
some of that "expected" loss of market share will go), the best advice to
anyone in any country would probably just be to find out which platform (PC
or Mac) they prefer, and can afford, and can get support for, and get it.
 Anticipating Macs' future market penetration is a little risky at this point
(remember that in 1973 experts said that by 1980 there would be no fossil
fuel).  With courts ruling that Microsoft has to refrain from its former
"anti-competitive" sales practices for its OS, and the general resentment
toward Microsoft that computer heads of my acquaintance have been exhibiting
lately, it's anybody's guess what kind of machine or OS the world will be
using later on.  Get what you want, it will be obsolete in a little while
anyway.

James Kirchner