I'll believe it when I see it.
The Great Kool-Aid Experiment, Part 2: History
I've been a computer user and programmer for a very, very long time. (Hint: Jimmy Carter was in the White House.) I've had a long, twisted history with computers. I love them. And I hate them. My history with Apple mirrors that.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The first computer I had any real exposure to was the DEC PDP-11/70 at the local college. In addition to using it for education and running the business of the college they allowed locals to use it for games, programming, etc. What hooked me was a text adventure game. It was called DUNGEO, short for Dungeon, one presumes. (The six character filename limitation wasn't invented by Microsoft.) In later days, once the PC and Mac came along, this game would be known as Zork. Believe it or not there are still people writing and playing similar games today.
The game held my interest for awhile but I recognize it now as the gateway drug that it was. Within a couple months I was hanging out at the computer lab, buying books about programming, typing in other people's code to see what it did. I suspect that was a pretty common way to get hooked on computers in the days before the Internet.About this time a number of different manufacturers started making microcomputers targeted at hobbyists and home users. The Commodore 64, numerous TRS models, the Apple (more on that below) all stem from this period of time. I had a couple of friends who had them and we used to write stupid little programs in BASIC. We also dabbled in the old CompuServe service but it was wicked expensive.
A9 42 20 ED FD
By the time I made it to college the Apple II (born at about the same time as my interest in computers) had given way to the II+ with the IIe not far behind. Again, I played many games on the platform but also did some serious programming. I learned, for example, pretty much everything I know about assembly programming on that platform. (I even wrote an editor/assembler as part of a research project.) I was so into it that I used to program in hexidecimal -- directly typing in the machine language instructions to make it do stuff. If you can decode the quote above then you know what I'm talking about.
There were several times during and after college that I wanted to buy an Apple but they were just too expensive. I seem to recall teh IIe (or maybe IIc) going for something like $1400 in 1984-85? Way more than I had to spend, for sure.
The first Macs came out in 1984 while I was a sophomore in college. To say that I wanted one doesn't begin to describe the lust. I wanted it not so much because it was cool or different but because I wanted to know how it worked. How did they draw those dots on the screen? How could you possibly write programs to deal with asynchronous input from the mouse? Fonts? Sadly, the introductory price was around $2500 (that's about $5K in 2007 dollars) and there was no way in hell I could afford that.
One of my friends had one of these as well. I recall it being wicked cool but that's about it. These days they're a very hot commodity when you can find them.
Interestingly, though the IBM PC was introduced before I started college I didn't use one until many years later. I was in the Navy, stationed overseas, and bored out of my mind. I took every opportunity to do whatever programming task I could get my hands on. Batch files, Word Perfect Macros, dBase II scripts, you name it. I learned many languages in this time. I improved my C skills with Microsoft Quick C. I expanded my knowledge of Pascal with Turbo Pascal and later Turbo Pascal with Objects. I accidentally bought a C++ compiler and figured I'd learn that as well. It was a whole "best of times, worst of times" situation for me.
This was also my first exposure to Windows followed (of course) by learning to program for Windows. This was in the very early 3.0 days. The machines were dog slow but we didn't know any better.
I got my first PC (not my first computer, that was a craptacular TI-99/4a that I got in 1983 when they were selling them at a loss) in 1992 after I returned stateside. It was a 486SX 25MHz with a mind boggling 1MB of RAM, and a spacious 110MB hard drive. I had lots of time to practice my coding on it. And I did.
My college experiences with Apple were uniformly good ones. After that, though, I found myself in a Mac-free zone. It was a number of years before I encountered one again and the experience wasn't nearly so good.
Shortly after I got my computer Lori decided that she needed to have one as well. She was still in grad school at the time and had very little experience on anything but a Mac, so that's what she bought. It was an LC II, one of the "Performa" series designed as low-end consumer machines. It was a 68030 chip running at (I believe) 16MHz. The color and graphics were nice, but it was way slower than my 486 and about twice as expensive.
This was my first exposure to Apple in over six years and it wasn't a good experience. It astounded me that Mac users were willing to pay more for less. I was also disturbed that Apple's marketing material seemed to be designed to make it as difficult as possible to figure out what you were buying. (A trend that, sadly, now rules the PC world as well.) In the PC world it was easy to tell what was what and which was more powerful. A 486/25 is faster than a 486/16. What the hell was the difference between a Perform 475 and a Performa 476? What's a Quadra? Is a Classic II better than an LC II?
I also wasn't happy when they released newer, faster, better, cheaper hardware scant months after she bought the LC II. (I'd offer more details but it was too long ago; they've been purged.)
It had a number of other problems as well, most notably that trying to get TCP/IP to run on it was about as simple as string theory. That wasn't so important in 1992 when she bought it but it was a drag a few years later.
About a year and a half or so after the LC II she also decided to buy a Power Book. I don't recall much about it as I never really spent much time with it.
The LC II experience was enough to sour me on the Mac for a very long time. I concluded (and I still feel rightly so) that Apple was more interested in style than substance, that they were greedy, and that they didn't care much for their users. That was enough for me. I was happy in the PC world. I began referring to the Mac as "a computer for the rest of you."
I became a Linux dweeb.
In 1998 I started playing around with Linux. I'd always been a command-line oriented guy even on Windows. I felt right at home in Linux and couldn't believe how much better the tools were than on Windows. Yeah, the UI sucked but look at these shell scripts I wrote! Until then I had been a staunch supporter of Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. (Hey, it's how I pay the mortgage.) I missed the choice and flexibility I had on Linux, though. Tasks that were trivial on Linux were horrendously complicated or downright impossible on Windows.
In short, I became a Linux dweeb. I began using it as my primary desktop system in 2000 and it's been there ever since.
The history of OS X is pretty twisted. Apple was working on a replacement for the "Classic" Mac OS as early as 1989. That's before System 7. Before the Mac needed a hard drive. Before the Mac even had color. There were a bunch of false starts (like when they almost bought BeOS) but eventually they ended up back where they started.
When they announced that the new OS would be built on the BSD kernel I was very intrigued. A Mac with Unix inside? With a command line? Not intrigued enough to buy one, mind you, but enough to actually pay attention. I was likewise curious when they later announced that they were moving to Intel and away from the PPC chip.
Unfortunately, my first experience with OS X wasn't a good one. It came, like most of my Mac exposure, courtesy of my wife. The company she was working at was all Mac, all the time. Unfortunately for them (and possibly for me) the company tended to buy older, under-powered, refurbished computers. An even bigger problem for them was that their primary application -- their one and only reason for being in business -- only ran on System 9. OS X has a "translation" layer that allows running "Classic" programs but it was very, very slow. It was also buggy, or rather they had many problems using it.
I went out on Saturday and plunked down $1300 on a brand new MacBook.
So here, I am, with a long history of hate and dislike for the Mac platform. I still have some issues with the culture around it, the idea that style is more important than substance, that form trumps function. I don't worship at the feet of Steve Jobs as so many of the true Mac faithful do.
I found a program that I really wanted that only runs on OS X. I made a few inquiries to see if I could borrow a Mac but there was no movement on that. So I took the plunge. I went out on Saturday and plunked down $1300 on a brand new MacBook. I went with the white, 2.4GHz model. (The black one is $200 more because, well, it's black. And has 90GB more hard drive space.) So far I really kinda like it, mostly. The fact that it will run Windows natively (just repartition the hard drive and install) or under emulation is a pretty big bonus. I'm poking around the innards, kicking the tires.
So what will this experiment show? Will it prove once and for all that I'm not a Mac guy? Or will I have a religious conversion and start to worship at Steve Jobs' iAltar? The reality will probably be somewhere in between.
Posted by John at October 9, 2008 5:41 PM | TrackBack