The Journey Begins

First post!!!

That was a stupid way to open a blog, why do people do that anyway?

This is about my journey (back) into the land of Apple Macintosh (I think it is just Mac now). Last night I found myself sitting in front a computer clicking on the Checkout button below the specs for a brand new 24" iMac. What a strange feeling indeed. How did I get here? To try and figure that out I suppose I should provide some backstory.

Growing up as part of the first home video game generation I found myself fascinated by the technology. If the names Atari VCS and Intellivision are familiar then you know the time period. We had the latter hooked up to an old console television in the house where I grew up. I played many hours of Blackjack against the shifty-eyed dealer. My first computer was an Atari 800XL which served me well for many years. I also had a couple of other Atari 8-bit computers before finally moving up to a small-shop 386 PC with Windows 3.0.

As I fine-tuned my computer programming skills in college I was bitten by the upgrade bug and before long was swapping out motherboards and CPUs, ordering RAM from Computer Shopper vendors (remember those huge ad magazines?), and trying to find good deals on hard drives. I had a CD-ROM years before they were standard on computers. I put OS/2 2.0 on my machine and attended an OS/2 Warp launch party (and still have the t-shirt to prove it). I was early into the Linux game and was compiling fixes into my kernel to get my external SCSI hard drive working with a Slackware distribution. I haven't purchased a ready-built desktop computer in over a decade and have installed various flavors of Linux, BSD and Solaris at one time or another. In short I tend to enjoy tinkering with computers and have been building my own systems for a long time. You could call me a power user (or luser) if you like.

So why did it take me so long to jump on the Mac bandwagon considering I like nice machines and shiny toys? Much of the answer has to do with my experiences about 15 years ago. I was toiling away as a lowly student at a university lab that featured Mac computers. Everything from the old black and white Mac 512s to Quadras. My experiences, frankly, weren't very positive. An OS that would constantly crash, the inability to run more than one program without something bad eventually happening, the lack of software (games especially) and device support and the fact that I had to service other people's problems with the machines soured me on the whole platform. I couldn't wait to get home to my PC. For the rest of the decade I couldn't figure out why on earth anyone would ever want to purchase a Mac. That remained the case until Steve Jobs came back to Apple and things started to improve.

I finally started to take notice when OS X arrived on the scene and have had my eye on Macs ever since. The final piece of the puzzle was the move to Intel and the ability to run Windows and just about any other OS out there natively or close to it. I'm probably not alone in my thinking and perhaps my chronicles will answer a few questions others have had.

So now that you know where I've been the next post will chronicle where I am and where I would like to go.