This section is not for techno bigots. Computer platforms are like people, like'em or not, there's a reason each of them is here. Like people, they all have strong points and shortcomings. I use the leading computers in all three flavors (UNIX, Windows & MacOS) on a daily basis. The following is just my humble opinion.

For years now the big kid in graphic production has been SGI. They so fully dominate the high-end of broadcast and motion picture graphic production that they have no competition. Many, if not most of the high-end graphics and modeling packages call the SGI home. Maya, SoftImage, and the industry leading Flint, Flame and Inferno from Discreet Logic are all SGI based software applications that only now are starting to migrate into other platforms.

At the top of the digital food chain is the ONYX. Pound for pound the most powerful computer in the business. I think its safe to say that the vast majority of effects in the big Hollywood blockbusters are first given life in the bit circuited depths of an ONYX super computer.

I had a four processor ONYX for several years and it spoiled me to the point where even my G4 dual 1GHZ Mac seems like a kid's toy. Until you've actually sat down at one of these beasts and worked on some densely layered graphics, you can't imagine how fast and powerful these things are.

But then there is the price, they are expensive, and not just the processor. First there's a matter of power; you don't just plug'm into the wall. And then there's the air conditioning, and all the peripherals that go into maintaining the rarefied environment that this kind of professional machinery demands.

As a very successful Inferno artist with movies like Godzilla, Mission Impossible2 and Pirates of the Caribbean to her credit, my wife Minky spends a good deal of time chained to a 24 processor ONYX. Its always a shock to her when we work on something at the house and she has to use her much smaller SGI Octane or her even slower G4/1GHZx2.

Speaking of Macs, the new Apple G5 is quite nearly the perfect digital production computer. They're quite inexpensive, easy to set up and move video around better than anything else out there, even the ONYX. The thing that you need to keep an eye on with Apple is that they try to drive their market with external design rather than engineering. Don't get me wrong, the G5 is about as finely engineered a piece of hardware as you could ever want sitting on your desk and the price point entry for the little iMacs is phenomenal.

The problem with Apple is their unbridled enthusiasm, which in a way is a good thing because it keeps everything fresh, but it also tends to drive the market with trivial things like external design, and color.

I recently finished creating the on-air graphics package for the new season of Ripley's Believe it or Not! television series. Now the production company that creates the shows is about as hip as you'll find in this industry and nearly every desk has an iMac sitting on it. While waiting in the reception room for a meeting, two people from the office were complaining about how so-and-so just got the new style iMac and they still had the old style.

Windows ... now here's a topic that's really in need of a fresh point of view. Granted, it's been known in the past as clunky, ill designed and unnecessarily obtuse, but there were just so damn many of'em out there that you knew someone would eventually get it right.

For years I've felt as though the DOS/Windows environment was just a necessary evil. When I wrote articles, it was usually with my Toshiba laptop, and then there were the software applications like 3D Studio, Maya and others that didn't run on the Mac. The new IBM IntelliStation POWER265 is a burly, snappy computer and even with a house full of Macs and SGIs I still use my IntelliStation to run Avid Xpress when the Mac based FinalCutPro3 chokes ... which is quite often.

Pound for pound, megabite for megabite, my favorite computer is the Sony VAIO PictureBook. It's about one inch thick, weighs in at two pounds, runs a 733MHZ Crusoe processor with 20 GB of storage. It has a very sharp color camera built into the lid, stereo speakers and runs all the cool graphics and video editing programs. We're not talking broadcast quality here, but it is the best 'brain peripheral' that I know of, and its Windows. Go figure.

If ask where this whole thing is going, I've got'a tell you that I just don't know. Film and Video are easy, just hop a plane to Tokyo and nose around. Communications is a Japanese thing, they control it. Computers, on the other hand are a uniquely American thing. Yeah there are companies outside the US that make computers but aside from the Sony VAIO line, they're all knockoffs.

Keep your eyes and ears open because these are very interesting times. The main thing to remember is that it isn't about computers anymore, no matter how cute they make them. It is only about what you can do with them.