Thank you for featuring the Mac this month [February]!
Andrew Silberman
It was great to see the Mac featured in the February issue. We are an intellectual bunch of arts and business lads who love to read and, although humble, we do glory in seeing our beloved Mac and Mac OS reviewed in print, especially in esteemed publications such as yours.
Mark Elliott
Thanks for writing about the Macintosh in your February issue. I've been reading Computing Japan since it started, and have always wondered why there has been a dearth of writing about a machine which is constantly rated superior to the Wintel platform for both ease of use and business productivity.
Your news sections regularly report on "new" products and functionality in the PC world. As a Mac user, I am constantly amazed because so many of these things have been standard on the Mac platform for years (built-in networking, multilingual capabilities, sound, and shared peripherals - just to get started). As an active member of Tokyo's largest English-language Macintosh User Group (Ringo MUG), I am often further amazed (and entertained) when I see PC users react when they see what Macs can do. Even with Windows 95 catching up, it is still pretty easy to make a PC user's jaw hit the floor.
The optimism about the future of the Mac in John Boyd's article was a welcome change to the media thrashing the Mac has suffered recently. Although it is easy to find fault with Apple as a company, recent performance tests of the new MMX and PowerPC chips indicate that the Mac OS is about to receive a major speed boost from the chip it runs on, while the MMX is squeezing final bursts out of an aging technology. This, combined with the potential of the Mac OS's marriage with NeXT Step's multitasking and protected memory technologies should continue to make it easy to keep PC users' jaws hitting the floor for some time to come.
I hope Computing Japan will continue to keep us informed of new developments in the Macintosh world.
Jef Fisher
As a confirmed Win95 user, Jef, I'll take your effervescent enthusiasm with a grain of salt. But speaking of the potentials of the MMX versus the PowerPC, watch for our article on this topic in the May 1997 issue. -Ed.
[In your discussion of Japan's installation of cable infrastructure ("The Digital Forest," February) ], what is the phrase, "thus leaping ahead of the West, which must retrofit existing networks" intended to mean? Just where is this "West" that needs to be retrofitted?
It certainly is not England, where we are just now getting cable - cable that is primarily fibre optical cable, not coax[ial] - and where the cable companies from the beginning are going after telecommunications services rather than giving the punters 120 channels of televangelists and home shopping.
I would be very surprised if my impression that most continental countries have almost no existing cable infrastructure was far from the mark. If by "West" you meant "the US" or "the US and Canada," why didn't you say so? If by "West" you thought that the US situation was typical of Western Europe, then you need to do some homework.
Earl H. Kinmonth
Sheffield, England
The author replies:
Point taken. I will take care to be more specific in the future.-Forest Linton
Our organization (ITTO) subscribes to Computing Japan, and we have just taken out a personal subscription at home. As my wife has a Power Mac 8100AV with HP Scanner and printer, and I use an IBM ThinkPad 365SX, we find your journal useful for people working in English with overseas-purchased machines in Japan.
Lachlan & Magda Hunter
Re your article on "Japan's first COMDEX" - memories are certainly short! I attended two COMDEX shows at the old Harumi exhibition center in previous years. After those shows, the sponsor pulled out due to the limited support from potential exhibitors and modest attendance. Maybe you should have asked the new sponsoring organization how they are going to turn a failure into a success.
James N. Porter
Your webpage... includes the message: "Our articles are also abstracted in the Anbar Management Intelligence, Europe's leading information management and technology abstracting service." I thought your readers might like to know that Anbar Management Intelligence (including Information Management & Technology Abstracts) is now online, featuring 75 articles from Computing Japan plus another 40,000 from the other top 400 management journals worldwide (as selected by an esteemed panel of management thinkers).
If your readers would like to try our database, they can get a thirty-day free trial by going to http://www.anbar.com/MCB/ANBARguest.html. For more information about Information Management & Technology Abstracts, please go to http://www.anbar.co.uk/products/imta.htm.
Mathew Wills, Vice President
Anbar Electronic Intelligence
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