Years ago I used to have a Cub Scout Pack, and we had a room full of Macintoshes; vintage ones like Mac SE's and Mac 30's. We would hurry up and do all the Cub scout stuff for the first half hour then the rest was time on the Macs, 1 per boy. They would stay as late as their folks would let them. We had them all networked with Appletalk, with games like Mazewars and DeJaVue. This was the 1987-1989 era. Now those boys are all grown up and have become police men, dentists, and other professionals, and they still come back and we marvel on how far ahead of the times we were.
I have a friend who used to do medical conferences in the late 80s. She and her coworkers all had Macs. They would get to their hotel room, set the systems where they could, plug them in and immediately be working together networked. And none of them were IT types.
Try that with any other system back then.
You said -- "... we marvel on how far ahead of the times we were."
And here we are -- still *far ahead of the times* with the Macintosh.
Look at what Apple has done! Booting Windows XP (for those who may need to) and having *both* the Mac OS X and XP on one machine -- and -- *supporting* it, too. You'll have both Microsoft and Apple support for doing that.
Apple is still far ahead of the times. I think they always will be.
Regards,
Star Traveler