On Computers

Okay, if you know anything about me (either of you) then you know that I am a Macintosh fan... nay, fanatic. Steve calls me a Mac Snob. All titles I wear proudly. Don’t get me wrong; to each his own. Whatever tool you need to get the job done... etc. But I find Macintosh to be the computer of choice for me.

There are a lot of Mac users who look down on Windows users, and vice-versa. I believe the reason most people are defensive of their computer choice because we tend to spend a lot of money to get the computer we want, then we add in software, peripherals and so on. We tend to put a lot of thought into every aspect of this investment, and when anyone belittles it, our hackles get raised.

But lest you think I have always been a Mac Snob, let me share my computer history with you.

Before I ever owned a personal computer myself, I worked with a variety of computers. We had the ubiquitous card punch, and that was what I spent much of my time with. I’d would sit down and type out my code (I was programming in Fortran IV), one line of code per card... and if I typo’d, I’d have to retype the entire card. When I was done, I’d take the stack of cards, put a slip of paper with my name on it, and wrap it all together with a rubber band. The stack got sent to the college across the street, and they ran it during the off hours, and sent the results back to you the next day. Invariably a 10 line program would result in a ream of paper listing all the defects in your program. Also invariably, you missed a single semi-colon, and the rest of it just cascaded into one cataclysmic failure.

But let’s get personal here. What were the computers that I owned? Well, arguably you could start with the Digi-comp I.  I also had a Digi-comp II, which was another binary computer powered by marbles. (To be honest, these were not as much computers as devices to teach/learn boolean/binary logic.)

Now somewhere along here, my friend Mike had bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately called the Trash 80), and I wrote my first BASIC program on it. But before I bought a computer I went to a computer faire in San Jose where I saw a variety of new computers headed for the home user. The Commodore PET caught my eye, as it was an all in one unit, but then I walked past the Apple II. Cool! Color!!!! I set for buying an Apple II, and started saving my pennies. But before I bought, I heard that Atari was going to produce a color computer called the Atari 800.
So I bought an Atari 800. It came with 8K (yes, 8192 bytes) of RAM and a cassette drive (for loading/storing data & programs) all for $1000. A 5 1/4” floppy drive was available after you added additional memory at $150 for 8K and $300 for 16K. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I spent a lot of time writing programs (in BASIC & Assembly language) for this versatile little 6502 computer.

Then 1984 arrived and Apple Computers released the remarkable Macintosh. Oh how I wanted one, but the price was a bit out of my reach, and the unit was was in black & white... from the company that was the first to release a color computer, they were, in my mind, stepping backwards to black & white. I still started saving my money... and then a cover story in Byte magazine introduced me to the Commodore Amiga A1000. With it’s fully multi-tasking operating system, and custom chipset (for audio and video) that was designed by Jay Miner (who designed the custom chips in the Atari 400/800), it looked to be a real winner. I registered as a developer and received my development system a full month (or so) before it was released to the public. I wound up learning the C programming language, and developing modules for other companies. It was an amazing time, and I loved the computer. Think of having an entire multi-taking graphical user interface operating system that would fit on a single floppy disk.

I upgraded to an Amiga 2000, and I think I had a 4000. Then Commode Door flushed. But before they did, I had purchased an “Emplant” card for it, and it was an emulator card/software that would let you run the Macintosh operating system. I’d bought Mac OS 7.5 (which came on 20 or so floppy disks) and was really getting into the Macintosh. Understand, I’d never lost touch with Apple since the Macintosh came out. I regularly purchased copies of Macworld magazine and would read it cover to cover. So when it came time to abandon my beloved Amiga, it took me very little time to make a decision which platform to jump to. I thought Windows was ugly, poorly written, unstable and not likely to be improved by Microsoft anytime soon. I do admit that Windows did eventually improve, but with every improvement was something that would make me shake my head and mutter that Microsoft “just doesn’t get it.”

So my first Macintosh was a 7500/100. I followed it with a G3 tower, a G4 dual processor “mirrored drive door,” and finally my current 8-core Intel Xeon tower. I have an Apple TV, an iPod Nano (1st Generation), and an iPhone (1st Generation), so you can definitely say that I drank the Apple cool-aid.

When you step back and look at the history of the personal computer history, it’s really amazing how far we’ve come in so little time. From hard drives the size of four current desktop PCs, and that weighed close to 100 pounds, and only stored 10 megabytes (10,240,000 bytes) to today’s drives that are about the size of a paperback book, weigh less than 5 pounds, and store 500 Gigabytes (512,000,000,000 bytes). And during that process the price has plummeted.