Cable
Cable4096@nospam.com
My vacation

Also I do happen to have a friend at Disney, but did not meet him. Another nice guess. He is an artist and he and his wife work as animators at Disney. While he was in St. Louis, Longshot (His handle, he is a fellow Irishman and a Comic Book Geek like me) got his start on a 386DX 33Mhz system that I later bought around 1988 from him and later let him borrow. He drew mostly on paper and on an MS-DOS and Windows 3.X based system. Oh yeah, Disney uses its own OS named DisneyVision for the Animatronics, the attractions, and the drawing and animating they use for most of their productions. So that line about MacOS being used for everything in the Disney Theme Parks is a load of BS. One Disney employee even joked about everything being run on a 286 system with two other 286 systems being run as backup in case the first one crashes so they don't have to reboot! :) He later talked about DisneyVision and custom made Intel based computer systems.

At the MGM/Disney Studios, a woman was taking a survey with a MessagePad, but it didn't seem to be working. I don't know if she worked for Disney or some other company, didn't think to ask. She was shaking the thing, because it had locked up on her, not sure if it was the system or the custom software. She said her PalmPilot at home works a lot better, but the software was written for the Newton series and OS, and the company decided to go with the Newton. She also had no idea what Windows CE was. :)

At Epcot, in the Innoventions area, one of the Wings, had an IBM display with Aptivas with a modified version of Internet Explorer 3.X that prevented the user from entering a URL, or minimizing or closing the program, etc. That is, unless the user knows the "shortcut" keys that IBM forgot to block! :) I was able to get the Apple Doomsday Clock on a few systems despite this, and an IBM employee claiming that only 200 sites could be seen by the systems. I asked if they had a Proxy server to filter out the bad sites, the lady I asked had no idea what a Proxy server was and said that if they had one it would limit to just the 200 sites.

For some reason the BBBS CGI script could not be executed and the system just timed out every time I went to access it. The speed of the system was so slow that it must have had over 20 systems sharing one single ISDN line! I use IE 3.X and IE 4.X on a local Intranet and they are not that slow at all. Then again, could be the IBM, er ah, Acer designs on the Aptiva or inproper configuration. Over 600 Pentium or better systems running Windows 95/IE on a local Intranet with one T3 via a Firewall Proxy Server was not as slow! I left the Apple Doomsday Clock on a few of the terminals and most people just ignored it and a few (Mac Users I guess?) ranted and raved at it, as if the web page's creator could hear them via the net. :)

This may not be related - but a few cars, trucks, and vans with the Apple logo sticker on them did try to tailgate or cut in front of us, almost got into an accident with a few of them. I wonder where they got their driving skills from? Coincidence, or not, who knows? :) I thought I could get away from the PC vs. Mac crazyness for a while, but they kept dragging me back in!