Hi Mac peeps,
I thought I'd just share a little story about my sorted past. In Feb of 2004 I bought a 15" PowerBook and I have to admit I feel like a bit of a slut. You may find what I'm about to say interesting, boring, funny or sad. It's up to you, I don't care.
I began my computing life in 1979 when I was just a lad. Remember, in 1979 having a computer was an oddity not the norm. My first computer was an "Intertec SuperBrain" 64K CPM computer. By today's standard a real POS but in the day it was a seriously big deal. My dad bought it for his business, convinced by a salesman that it would improve the quality of his life
Anyway, it was a wicked complex machine. It had no graphics support whatsoever, pure ASCII and the display wasn't even addressable so aside from BOL and EOL you couldn't actually move the cursor to anywhere but the next line. It had a cheesy debugger and a copy of MS BASIC. There was no software at all except a silly StarTrek game.
I would spend my weekends going to my Dad's office and screwing with this thing out of pure science fiction facination. I eventually figured out how to view the BASIC source code for the Star Trek game and using 3 volumes of binder bound "documention" figured out how it worked. I continuted to play with that thing for years. My Dad got stung on it's purchase and had a computers are evil attitude which I think still remains to this day even though he now has a web site
I managed to convince him to buy a Zenith brand PC clone in about 1983. It had DOS and there was some software available for things like accounting. Having this machine and graphics capability dreastically improved my BASIC skills. It even had a 5MB hard drive (full height) which was massive!
When I entered High School they had PETs and I took some CS classes. When I switched schools around grade 10 they had Apple II computers. I loved LodeRunner
Shortly after leaveing HS incomplete I landed a job as a company which had a 512K Macintosh. I loved that thing and I guess you could consider that my first "switch" to Mac. I came to acquire that 512K Mac shortly afterward and used it for at least a year as my computer of choice. It landed me a job at a company which distributed Mac hardware and software to resellers. I joined them as Technical Support and quickly became their Mac networking expert. While there I had a Mac II, SE and IIcs.
When I left them I couldn't afford a Mac for myself so I ended up back in the PC world and started working with Xenix. Usenet and UUCP was starting to get popular and I had my Xenix box polling others in the Usenet world for email and news. It was fun and I got to learn *NIX stuff.
Shortly thereafter I was offered another Mac job and was back again in the Mac world, "switch" #2. That lasted about a year and then once again, for financial reasons, was back in PCland.
By this time the Internet was just going public. I racked up some massive and as yet unpaid ISP bills. Linux 0.9 was out and I started playing with that and found myself becoming involved more and more with the Internet, *NIX and PCs. I've been doing that ever since.
Around Dec of 03 I started looking at notebooks. I wanted a notebook but Windows XP was giving me no end of grief. If I was going to invest in a $3000 notebook I certainly didn't want it to be a purchase I'd regret.
I talked around with some friends. One had a Dell and it was a really sweet machine. Great display, powerful, it was my #1 choice. Another friend had an iBook. He loved it and he loved OSX. So that was my #2 choice.
After considering my options for a couple of months I knew that I needed good application support (email, contacts, word processing, general office apps), it needed a GUI I could work with all day long (that took Linux out of the picture), it needed to work solidly without all those stupid hardware issues notebooks are famous for. I knew that I wasn't dependent on Windows so a Mac with Office was a viable solution.
My final decision was reached when while I was staying at my Dell friend's place I was surfing the Internet on his notebook. He had gone to bed so when I was done I shut the lid to put it to sleep. The next morning he said that I shouldn't close the lid because it caused Windows to crash. My decision was reached! That was precisly the sort of thing I didn't want in a notebook!
I ordered my PB two weeks later. I guess that's switch #3 for me. I haven't looked back since
My PB and OSX work flawlessly. No stupid hardware issues and the software support is great. I use VirtualPC to download the OBD-II codes from my car but other than that I have no need of Windows.
Cheers and happy Macing
My neighbor ran a priate board with his Apple II+, 4 phone lines, and 8 5.25 floppies.
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