Yes MRX, my Cube has OS 9.xx
I’m not sure exactly which version as it was upgraded at some point. No doubt the newer OS 10 is much better, but then Windows has improved as well. My comparisons are based on when I was using the Cube at the office and had a Win 2000 Professional machine at home. I bought the Cube when I worked for an architect who was a real Mac junkie. We had one Windows machine in the office, and it was loaded with Autocad so I used it. Eventually the boss decided to become an all Mac office using other software and had me start using an iMac. I disliked the iMac, as it was crashy and didn’t even have a real delete key on the keyboard which made editing memos a pain, so I figured that if I was going to use a Mac I should just get a nice new one and start fresh. Some things I loved about the Cube were the total lack of noise, nice build quality, and beautiful industrial design. Actually using it was a different matter though. Some issues were:
-Cheap little one-button mouse, with no scroll wheel or pan button. This was soon replaced by a Microsoft three-button mouse . . . given that the Cube wasn’t a BOL computer Apple should have been embarrassed to supply such a low end (if beautiful) mouse.
-Fairly crashy nature, better than the iMac but much worse than Win 2000. And, when it crashed, you just had to give up and pull the plug because it almost never would do a forced shutdown and let you save data.
-The need for memory adjustments. It frequently needed some sort of adjustment to reserve certain amounts of the memory for certain programs, even though the total system memory met the software vendor’s requirements. I added more RAM and still had to do this.
-It had a habit of changing file names which just infuriated me. When I save a memo I try to include enough information in the name to allow me to recall what the context was. For instance “Huntington Woods Lot 2 Alan-Jeff memo 12-10-03" would be a memo for a project called Huntington Woods, Lot 2 is the particular house in the project, Alan and Jeff are the owners, and the date is self-explanatory. If instead of “Alan-Jeff” I put “Kamal” then I know that memo was to the project structural engineer who is named Kamal. I moved a bunch of files into the Cube and it renamed them something like “Huntington Wo###345X2". I never could figure out this code, but it meant that every memo in that project file started with the same title and the code numbers meant nothing to me. Instantly I lost any ability to differentiate out one memo from another without opening each one up . . . that was a real time waster if I needed to refer to a previous memo. Sometimes it would also re-alphabetize my files from Z to A instead of A to Z . . . very annoying.
-It had problems dealing with extensions. I found this out when I downloaded a bunch of project photos from my digital camera to the Cube and later copied some to the Windows machine to do some organizing and filing over the weekend. The Cube had stripped the .jpg extension off all the file names, which meant I had to manually re-name every single photo so they would display. Again, a real time waster, and I learned to be careful when sending files to clients or consultants as I often got emails back saying the files were corrupted and unreadable, when in reality they were just fine but had no extensions.
-Using software which isn’t industry standard. This isn’t the fault of the Cube, but made using it more troublesome. Most all CAD programs have conversion engines which will convert from their native file formats to and from the industry standards, which are Autodesk .dwg and .dxf formats. They kind of work, but you’ll lose lots of display and plotting information during the conversion. At the start of a project the drill was to get a survey from the surveyor, convert it to PowerCad (the Mac program in question), then spend a bunch of time resetting line types and line weights . . . once another employee and I spent a total of six hours to convert a complex survey and it still didn’t display correctly. After you have progressed through design development on the project then it is time to re-convert the plans and survey back into a .dwg to be sent to the civil and structural engineers. If you don’t check this on a Windows machine and make sure your conversion is good then you are likely to get a nasty email from the engineer saying that his draftsman is charging extra because the drawings are such a mess. Once you get the engineer’s drawings back then it is time to do another conversion, etc. In my case this was made worse by the use of PowerCad, which isn’t even a particularly good Mac program. Both Vectorworks and Archicad are way better, and available for Windows as well, which means that conversions to their native formats can be done in a Windows machine before it is all moved to the Mac. This does mean keeping a Windows machine in the office just to coordinate with the rest of the world, however.
Eventually I just got tired of dealing with the Cube and all the required work-arounds, and quit working full time for that boss. I still did consulting work for him for some time, and relegated the Cube to dealing exclusively with email from his office. In that capacity, it was totally happy and rarely crashed or misbehaved, but then again it was kind of pricey for an email machine.
The real irony of this is that the boss in question still is a Mac guy, but has gradually moved all his production work to Windows. He and his secretary still use Macs, but everyone else in the office uses Windows because it is more business oriented and he can make more money with less hassle that way.
and it's not even particularly easy to get nor is it particularly damaging.
