[Ham-Mac] Are you running OSX on your Mac ?

[Tim McLeod]

> I'm curious how many hams are running OSX on their "primary" Mac.

I am running  OSX on my "primary" Mac, but I don't think that is the correct
question!
My guess is that most hams use surplus older machines for their radio work,
and although we're not all as fortunate as Jim Duffey, we're not likely to
tie up our "primary" machine to do radio work.

Having said that, my "Primary" machine is an iBook SE which I use with a
Griffin iMic adapter.  I have had reasonably good results with this in OS 9
and it seems to perform as well in OSX.  I have also used this setup with
Virtual PC (in OS 9) to run some Windows based ham software with good
results.

I expect that we will soon see a lot of G3 iMacs and iBooks migrating to the
Ham Shack and this is where I would concentrate development.  The iMic
concept of separating the ADC/DAC from the computer is a solid one!  Perhaps
more could be done to talk directly to this device rather than treating it
as a pseudo built-in sound card?

In OSX, I'm looking forward to more ports of Unix software as Don suggested.
So far, I haven't seen any OSX ham software that doesn't look like OS 6
software in a new window, but we're still in the early days of OSX.