this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Also, enterprise infrastructure running on a Mac? It’s something I’ve never heard of in over a decade and a half of working in tech. And now I’m curious. Is it a thing?
I’ve never heard of Macs running embedded systems - I think that would be a pretty crazy waste of money - but Mac OS Server was a thing for years. My college campus was all Mac in the G4 iMac days, running MacOS Server to administer the network. As far as I understand it was really solid and capable, but I guess it didn’t really fit Apples focus as their market moved from industry professionals to consumers, and they killed it.
Depending on what your definition of "enterprise" is, I've attended what was at the time a fairly large and prestigious art school that ran everything on Macs.
They even preferred that we didn't bring windows laptops, although after some.. rather intense protests by pretty much anyone under 25 we did get to bring our own peripherals.
Edit: I'll also add that outside the shitty keyboards and mice, the server system they had set up with our accounts on etc was completely fine.
Never had a single issue with it and it was my first ever touching a Mac.
When you say ran everything, what kinda stuff?
This is almost 20 years ago today, so my memory is a bit hazy, but basically each student had an account with a certain amount of server space. I can't remember the size, but given the amount of digital files we produced it would've been at minimum 500GB+/student. We could also "see" the account folder for everyone else in our class for file sharing and stuff.
There were also accounts/folders for each teacher which were used to turn in the primary copy of whatever assignment we had done if it was in digital form. Physical art were scanned or photographed also, as a sort of backup. We were also required to back every project up via USB sticks, ofc.
There was also a rack with individual docks for each digital camera that they had which allowed us to get our photographs transferred to our own folders. Since we could access those files from our accounts it also was a part of that server system.
There were also several networked and customised Macs used for single tasks, like larger printing projects and also for an airgapped paintgun for a lack of a better description. We avoided having to wear masks when we printed large sheets in single colours with it, for example. I have no idea what software that thing used, I think I used it like once or twice.
Now, I'll freely admit that I haven't touched a Mac since I left that school, and I've never had any interest in them whatsoever, so I don't know what they used or if it even exists anymore. Someone with more knowhow maybe does?
I do remember them specifically (proudly) telling us it all ran on Macs, otherwise I probably wouldn't have any reason to believe so. The "server room" was basically what looked like a glorified closet with a rack and a couple of Macs that didn't look like the ones we students used. This was just before the all-in-one models were introduced, iirc.