Comments on: When did YOU decide to let your Mac freak flag fly?

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:10:24 +0000

All right. I’m a boomer. So sue me:
1965 bad experience with Fortran
1967 more keypunch misery
1970 glimpse of mysterious TV-like screen, while ambitions focused on getting access to IBM Selectric typewriter for thesis
1971 more keypunch misery
1972 more keypunch misery
1973 sightings of exotic 4 function electronic calculators at prices of Mac Mini in nominal, non-inflation adusted dollars (i.e., fully tricked out Macbook Pro)
1974 my first programmable HP-25
1975 communicating (115 baud) IBM mag card typewriter
1976 HP-67
1978 first fax, Wang word processor
1979 first sighting of Apple II
1980 IBM S/34, 800 lbs, green on black CRTs with phospor burn-in
1981 Osborne, CP/M, Wordstar, Supercalc and the rest
1982 …. PC with DIY memory upgrades requiring inserting chips individually onto motherboard, BASIC, Pascal, dBase II
1984 DEC micro PDP-11 with a v.7 UNIX, first root, sh, C
1985 VAX mini (shudder)
1990 PCs ……….. DOS, Windows 2.x, 3.x, NT 3.5, 95
1996 SGI Indy workstation, back to my roots, httpd, ldap, mail, certificate serving, Perl
1998 PCs ……….. 98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, blue screens
2005 Got a iPod shuffle, got a mini, grew a beard, got an iPod, got the last of the Powerbook G4s
2006 official Mac Bigot
2007 installing MySQL, R, considering Ubantu

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:31:35 +0000

I’m a little offended that you didn’t think “Butterstick” was a serious suggestion.

Consider yourself on notice, Omnigroup.

By: Andrew S

Andrew S — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 07:17:56 +0000

Software - began with the venerable WordStar and BASIC on some version of Concurrent CP/M-86 in early 1987. (Amazingly, so many of those key sequences I learned in WordStar, like ^E to jump to end of line, ^A to the start, ^U to kill a line and ^W to kill a word, are right there in the command shell you use in the Mac OS X Terminal. But they call ‘em Emacs bindings instead of Wordstar. It’s a funny world.) Writing gigantic, monolithic BASIC programs was at least as much fun as actually running them, or playing them, as they were mostly games …

My first Mac encounter would have been in the early 90’s, as a school friend had some species of Mac at home that his dad had for his university teaching. I began using them regularly myself in 1995 when I began university and bought my first one, an LC375, in 1996. It’s still on a shelf. =)

By: Nabil

Nabil — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:06:37 +0000

My family was using an Apple II when I was a baby, and when the Mac Plus came out, they decided to migrate to the new system, and since it was for the business, they splurged and went with the 4mb expansion and 20mb external drive that was nearly as large as the Mac itself. I spent a considerable amount of my youth fiddling around with it (not allowed to have games on it, but playing with early copies of Word and Aldus Pagemaker did me just fine). I didn’t really get to start diving into the inner workings of Macs until I got my own, a Performa 575, which I promptly installed Marathon and ResEdit on, and fiddled with rsrc files galore, altering the trash icon, and in general inadvertently discovering ways to end up in the bootloader.

I got into programming because I wanted to make my own games, and was introduced to Logo and BASIC in 3rd and 4th grade on Apple IIs in school. I’ve since dabbled in TrueBASIC, VB, C/C++, Java, and Obj-C… none of which I’ve really retained much of. I keep trying, though, in the hopes that it’ll actually stick “this time”. I think it’d help if I actually was able to dedicate some serious time to just that, and really dive in.

By: leeg

leeg — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 19:22:09 +0000

My parents got our house’s first computer the year after I was born, and as it had built-in BASIC I can’t remember when I wasn’t a hacker. On the other hand, I didn’t realise it was the career for me until I got to the computing lab at University and it was filled with NeXTs. I’m now an ObjC hacker

By: DV Henkel-Wallace

DV Henkel-Wallace — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:45:27 +0000

Oh yea: for the new GTD app: has someone suggested “iGetALife”? I got mine back after I read the GTD book….well after I finally started implementing it!!

By: DV Henkel-Wallace

DV Henkel-Wallace — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:43:40 +0000

First computer personal computer was long long ago. It was a PDP-10 and you could use it all by yourself for a while at night, in the machine room. It was perhaps half a dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets. An early minicomputer. I still have a few old joke mails in my mail file from the late 1970s…

BUT more importantly: teach your kid German. My kid had many books on subjects like tractors, animals, etc. Who knew that the Germans had such a rich ontology of earth-moving apparatus? And he wanted me to drill him for hours on end…or rather he would drill _me_: he’d point to a picture and I would have to tell him what it was.

Over and over again.

I was so happy when he (finally) learned how to read. They don’t believe in teaching ‘em even the alphabet until 1st grade where he’s in school (knives and saws and drills and such on the other hand are apparently A-OK). And _I_ don’t believe in exposing him to computers until he’s 10 or so. Hopefully the “desktop” will actually be a metaphor rather than a bizarre abstraction!

By: Benjamin Ellis

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 05:53:00 +0000

I cannot remember a time when I was not a mac user. My mother used to do illustrations for newspapers, catalogs, magazines, ect. As the industry changed she had to adapt and she went with what her industry was using, macs. So, ever since she has been a graphic artist. My house always had macs because that is what she used and continues to use. I think we had a PC once that was used for playing games, but we hardly ever used it. Today I remain a mac user as does the majority of my family except for a few misguided relatives, who never saw the light. I will admit however, recently ubuntu has been looking pretty nice

By: michelle

michelle — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:03:43 +0000

In 1984 I was in 4th grade and the original Mac was released. My dad was doing work for a small publishing company and they sent us one to try out. I got addicted to MacPaint and the rest is history.

By: Grant Hutchins

Grant Hutchins — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:34:26 +0000

I first remember seeing a Mac when I was probably about 7 or 8 years old at a Kinko’s (sometime around 1990). There was this strange display on the computer that let you move things around and put them into a trash can. That trash can captivated me so much! I think I had only been exposed to the Apple II at that point, and my first Windows 3.1 computer wouldn’t come for a couple more years.