I’ve recently taken the plunge and purchased a new aluminum macbook, the first mac I’ve owned in nearly 16 years. This article is the first in a series on my return to Apple as my primary computer.
Many years ago I was an avid fan of the “other” computers out there. I’ve had, over the course of many years, several variants on Atari and Amiga computers. I even spent a short stint with a few homemade devices. The first machine I really enjoyed using, however, was my Mac.
My first mac was a Macintosh Plus, expanded on the same day I purchased it with a second floppy drive after umpteen disk swaps. I loved the ease of use and a full meg of RAM was huge in its day. It didn’t have the pretty colors of my Atari ST, but there was more software for it and everything just worked. How I’ve missed the days when everything just worked.
A few years later I traded in the Plus and upgraded to a Macintosh SE/30 with an absolutely huge 40 megabyte hard drive and 4 meg of RAM. I got very familiar with System 6 as I began to explore what could really be done. I learned Turbo Pascal and played with QuickDraw. I added some home-brew software and hardware to it and developed a BBS in HyperCard. I still consider Hypercard to be the inspiration for the World Wide Web and what will be the rise of the Internet.
For a number of reasons not related to how nice my Mac was, my next upgrade left the cult of mac. I steered through a few other GUI-based systems before my work and career pretty much determined that I would have to have a DOS-based system at home.
Fast forward to early February 2009. I have a home network nowadays, like everyone else. I built a media server to stream video to several devices around the house. I’ve had several flavors of unix/linux boxen for such things as bulk storage and firewalls. And each of them took days of tweaking, cursing and cajoling to make them work reasonably well. I had become accostomed to setting aside a Saturday afternoon to setting up a new machine – adding network and printer drivers convieniently left out of the installation, removing the dozens of pieces of “demo” software I’d never use, installing a handful of open-source items I can’t live without and making a handful of CDs or DVDs to be sure I could restore the system at least yearly, if not montly, when something goes wrong.
By coincidence, I purchased my new Macbook on the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the original Macintosh. I took it home in its little white box, expecting to spend at least a few hours getting it hooked up to my network. With surprise, it asked me a handful of questions and then within 10 minutes I was at a desktop. And there, at the top, just where I’d left it years before, was Finder.
Oh how I’ve missed you, Finder.
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