I am a student, and as a Mac user at home I am always interested to see how Macs are used here in University of Waikato. So may I talk a bit about what I found out.

1. Two years ago, Law School dumped some really old Macs, I bought one 8100 from them, they told me they "switched" to Dell, because Dell is cheap.

2. Department of Computer Science, there are two computer labs equipt with Macs. The first Lab with G4 400Mhz? Silver (OS 9), around 20 units?, mainly for level 2 & 3 Computer Graphics papers and some discret math practicals. The second lab is a new one for the new Graphic degree students, eMacs (OSX) , 20 units?, soley for those guys drawing.

I do think the first lab should upgrade to OS X, so these machines could be use for C++/Java/Cocoa programming. as OS X is the perfect environment for CS programming. check out www.macosxlabs.org

3. Rest CS labs are of PCs (many DELL/local brand PC/few Compaq)

4. I can not see any Mac in Management School labs, mostly Compaq PCs.

5. I saw quite a few G3 iMacs in School of Education lab.

6. Seems like most lectures I met in this university carry Dell laptops. (over 80% roughly).

7. Within two years, I saw only one person carrys an ice iBook. he looks like to be a student.

8. One of my CS lecturer use G3 PowerBook for PowerPoint presentation.(subject:Human Computer Interaction)

9. I saw one lecturer from School of Arts carry a G3 PowerBook (subject: motion picture?)

10. Someone in CS dept surely loves Apple, there is a Macquarium on the reception frontdesk.

BTW, I have put the 2003 Waikato University academic calender on iCalShare.com, hope you fin this helpful.

icalshare.com/article.php?story=20021213060956429

The Social Science department has a lab of ageing, buggy, crashy first edition iMacs (truly, they are nasty.. overuse I would blame). They also have a lab of G4 towers for Graphic art stuff, and a lab of eMac's hidden somewhere (I know they are in the building because I saw a buttload of empty eMac boxes being moved around the hall's once) I just don't know where..

They're rev A's IIRC. The old 'bondi blue' that always struck me as more green... Do they still have the old imation superdrives or did the support staff ditch them?



I think they belong to Film and Media or whatever the department is currently called.



CMS has a lab of eMac's - I wasn't aware of a lab of them in FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)...

Mac's were dominant at the University in the early-mid 90's, but they'd lost a lot of ground to cheaper PC hardware etc.

When I was at Auckland University (way back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth ) we had a big brand new Computer Science lab which was full of Mac and Mac+ computers and there were a couple of small rooms with Macs over in the Engineering and other buildings. We also used a Lisa / MacXL at the front of the lab to book computer time on. It was so new that we often knew more than the lecturers about the system.

I've no idea what they've got there now though, probably a room full of Wintel boxes with a few Macs for the graphics courses.

It seems that the number of Macs at the university are increasing, I would say it is about 50/50 now where I am among students. Staff is provided wit PC laptops but some of them have Macs too that they use.
Now if only the University would switch over to all Macs.

Back in the dim distant past (1987/88/89) when I was a student at the University of Canterbury we had a couple of labs with Mac SE's in them. I have fond memories of my discovery of Hypercard and learning to program in that.
I really must get back in to doing some programming, Applescript might be a good start, as I really need to upskill to try and get on in my career. After almost 20 years in IT I'm getting a little tired of working in a 'helpdesk' type environment doing 2nd/3rd level support.
It would be great to know what I could do to make my career more mac-centric, but something tells me there isn't a lot of point to that in NZ.