Stanford University School of Medicine

Mac OS X Consolidates Three Desktop Systems

Stanford, CA — For years, Dr. Michael Cherry’s desk was lost in space. More precisely, he’d lost most of his desk’s available working space. A researcher in comparative genomics in Stanford School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics, Cherry had three full-sized desktop computers on his desk — a Macintosh, a Windows system, and a UNIX “box” — on which he conducted his studies. But with the help of Mac OS X, Cherry recently did some office housecleaning. Now, a single Power Mac running Mac OS X gives Cherry uncluttered access to his genome data, while delivering all the computing muscle he needs.

Cherry and his colleagues are funded through research grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH). The team publishes its findings through web-based genome and research community databases, collecting data on comparative genome sequencing between organisms. In that capacity, the scientists spend the majority of their office hours before their computer screens.

“On my desk I used to have an iMac, a PC, and an X terminal. It was pretty crazy until Mac OS X came along.”

— Dr. Michael Cherry, Associate Professor,
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine

“Working on our computers is what we do!” laughs Cherry. “We do computational biology, we retrieve data, perform various calculations and comparisons, and we make the results available to the scientific community. In my case, on my desk I used to have an iMac, a PC, and an X terminal — a UNIX box — and switched back and forth between the three, depending on where the tool that I needed was located. It was pretty crazy until Mac OS X came along.”

Three into One

With the dawn of the new Macintosh operating system, Cherry notes, his fragmented computing environment immediately came to an end. Mac OS X’s UNIX-based core, along with XFree86, a freeware implementation of the X11 windowing system, easily managed his group’s UNIX research needs.

Says Cherry: “Mac OS X has the UNIX infrastructure, and it’s working just great for us. Now we can download Mac-compiled versions of all of our favorite UNIX tools through the ‘Fink’ system. These are all basic development tools that UNIX people have become used to, such as the GNU [freeware] packages. With Mac OS X, it’s just effortless.”

Simple Cut and Paste

Right away, Cherry adds, he saw a huge productivity boost with Mac OS X. Instead of a laborious, inefficient process of file-sharing between three operating systems, Mac OS X enables Cherry to incorporate any desired tool’s result into his Mac files with just a few clicks.

Says Cherry: “The first cool thing about Mac OS X is that it’s given me the ability to copy and paste. That may seem trivial, but when I had the three systems on my desk, I had to copy something into a file, or have someone email it to me, then send it to one of the three file servers...it was really kludgey. Copying and pasting between an X11 window and Internet Explorer was the first thing I tried with Mac OS X, and it worked great. Now I use it every couple of minutes, and it’s saving me lots of time.”

Productivity on the Road

Cherry says he’s been especially pleased with his newfound ability to attend to his research duties while on the road. A Mac user since 1984, Cherry always took his trusty PowerBook along on his travels. But even though he was pleased with the system’s performance, he was still constrained by the “triple threat” of his lab’s computing environment.

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