The boat I missed the first time round.

Welcome to the section of my "useless web experience" where i expand and expound upon computers.  as usual, this is my opinion only, and you may feel free to disagree at any time.

my first computer was an Atari 800.  real quality.  it came with less RAM than the watch i am wearing right now.  the only method of saving programs was a separately purchased tape recorder.  if you typed in the 45 WPM range you could type a program back into the machine faster than it could be loaded from tape.  you would be less likely to make mistakes too.  ah memories....

i upgraded the RAM, and in time the magic of disk drives came to the Atari.  and with it came software piracy!  the first real clue i had of things to come was a guy in the apartment complex where we lived my sophmore year.  he had 3 computers.  aside form the fact that one was an Atari, i don't recall the makes.  one day while talking about some game or other he showed he that he was actually copying a game from a friend in another state over the phoneline!  the game was almost a whole meg too.  we were amazed.  seems pretty silly now.  i once told that story to a student, and he asked why he didn't just email it.  times change.

about that time i took a class in my high school that was to prepare us for the future.  computer class.  it prepared me for about a week into the future.  i didn't touch a computer for 3 months after that class, and when i went back they had loaded windows unto all the machines.  it was like the class had never happened.  nothing was the same.

Windows

the new w.i.m.p. environment wasn't all bad.  it just didn't do anything to impressive.  i mean all the games and programs we had written in class had to run in DOS, and the school hadn't installed any software besides windows, so really all you had was a text editor and a game or two.  (was minesweeper in the original 3.1 release?  i forget)  i was under whelmed.  i left the world of computers for a few years.

when computers came back to me, it was by way of my wife, who wanted to be able to access all this wonderful information available on the universities gopher and bulliten board system.  i was impressed with what was out there, but getting to it was more than arcane.  still, photo CDs where just hitting the market, and i wanted to be able to manipulate images.  we bought a top of the line 486.  it had a massive 4 megs of RAM and a modem and CD drive.  the harddrive was 210 megs.  the drives we used at school were 20!  what would i ever do with all that?  answer: fill it.

playing with CD images was very cool, but painfully slow.  i would click to open an image in full resolution, and go make tea.  the image was often, but not always, open when i returned.  putting an image through a filter often took even longer.  i found image manipulation to be painfully frustrating.  the rewards were impressive when you could get them, but the work was almost more than they were worth.

i found a new use for the computer then though.  two in fact.  Doom, and Netscape.  there weren't a whole lot of pages to surf back then, but it was like having a library installed in your own home.  information junky that i am, that was pretty cool.  i burned a lot of hours on what i would latter realize was a very proprietary net.  at the time it didn't matter.

Doom was a whole other story.  i had played "first person" style games before.  lucas put one out for the Atari i had loved.  Doom wasn't turn based though, and it moved fast.  kids today would certainly make fun of it as slow, predictable, and very low on the graphics scale, but it was the first of its kind (not really, Wolfenstein was, but Doom got played by nearly everyone, and had atmosphere) and really blew us away.  the best parts of the game though were the ability to play other people on their machines, and make your own maps.  i made or modified over a dozen maps, and downloaded countless more.  getting the computer to dial my brother so we could play was an exercise in hacking, and nobody in either household was happy we tied up the phone lines, but we loved it.  sometimes to avoid the phone tie up i actually packed the machine up and took the whole thing to his place.  great times.

32 bit crashing

in time windows 95 came out.  i was not impressed.  it cost a lot (for my budget at the time) and did exactly what i already had.  plug and play?  i already had everything working!  32 bit?  what good was that?  faster?  sure, after you upgrade your hardware to run it!  then install it and it slowed down again!  in time though just about every new product or game requiered 95, so i did it.  i regreted it.

oh it was really cool at first, and there were new features, but plug and play was more plug and pray, and crashes were serious.  watching blue screens and reinstalling from scratch got boring.  but what choice did i have, a Mac?  hardly!  they were easy to use, but useless.  who cares if it is easy to do nothing!

besides, windows 98 was due out soon and it would fix the problems, right?

well 98 was just 95 with a new splash screen, and should have been a free upgrade.  98SE was more of the same, but a personal insult was involved.  i bought SE because the microsoft web page said i could share my net connection with it.  since i had two machine now that sounded good to me.  it would have been too if it had worked.  what they failed to tell you was it could only share your modem, but not broadband.  would have been nice to know before i sent them cash.

penguin power

windows SE was the camel that broke this straws back.  i ordered a set of corel linux disks the next day.  i installed them on the second computer, and found out that operating systems could operate.  corel wasn't top of the line linux by any means, but it was pretty cool.  i tried several more "distros" and soon settled on Mandrake .  it did everything windows did (except play those windows games) and it did it faster.  it was also stable beyond belief.  oh you could crash an application, but the whole system?  nope.  restarting, even shutting down became things of the past.  linux let me do things with my computer for the cost of "time to learn how" that windows would have allowed me only for the cost of thsounds in server software.  it was heaven.

learning about linux taught me a little about unix.  it was a combination of the unix architecture and open source program styles that gave linux the power i loved.  and other systems had those same benifits. BSD for example.  i tried one of the BSD's and found it harder to install than linux, but otherwise basically the same.  so i went back to linux for ease alone.  linux was difficult enough to handle, why make it harder?

that was then...

linux kept getting easier and easier to use though, and sometime in the summer of 2002 it became, in my mind, easier than windows.  most people argue with that, but i disagree.  the difficult part of linux today is the install, and even that is easy.  give a novice computer user a properly installed linux machine, and they can learn it as fast or faster than windows.  i am not alone in thinking that.  a city in florida that converted all their systems to linux with a KDE desktop claims that the only trouble they had was teaching everyone to single click icons rather than double click.  steep learning curve.

i love linux, and it brings power computing to the masses if they will just accept it.  my desktop machine runs mandrake today and is an excellent ftp/file/web server and desktop all at once.  it isn't what i use for everyday computing though.

coming back around

i am writing this page on a Mac .  you know, the computer i said i wouldn't use cause it didn't do anything?  well times change, and so do operating systems.  the people at Apple deceided that unix was power too, and they changed from the old Mac system to a unix based operating system with the release of OS X.  OS X is build on a foundation of BSD, that cousin of linux that was too hard for me to use.

Macs though are known for their ease of use.  in fact in 1996 there was a compitition of sorts to see if it was easier to use a Mac or windows.  two teams would compete in real world tasks like hooking up a zip drive, creating a file, connecting to network, and sharing a file.  one team would use windows, the other a Mac.  it was surprising to many windows users on more than one level.  the windows team consisted of the editor in cheif of a windows tech magazine, and his assistants.  the Mac team was the first shock.  it consisted of a single 10 year old boy.  the fact that he beat the team of windows experts in almost every category should tell you something.  the fact that during the test the windows machine crashed six times should say even more.

the best part of the story though is that while the Mac was fresh from a factory sealed box, the windows machine was tested for a full 4 hours before the contest began.  even better, they spent 2 hours speaking to Microsoft tech support because they couldn't get the printer to work.

the software people at Apple have made BSD as easy to use as their older operating systems.  but it still has unix power.  "it just works" is a slogan Mac users often repeat.  unless you have used one though, you don't get it.  this isn't windows "insert a CD, choose your driver, tell the machine 'yes i really do mean that driver' restart, find out you had to install something else first, reinstall, and it works."  it isn't even linux "if you edit the right text file it will work."  you just do it.  it is shocking.

i installed my printer to use on my Mac yesterday.  i simply plugged it in.  no drivers, no install message, no CD changing, no work.  i plugged it in.  i thought i broke it when no window asking to install popped up.  i made it harder than i had too.  you just select print with the power on.  how much easier could it be?

do it in style

there is more to it than simplicity and power though.  Apple makes good looking hardware and software.  i have an ibook, my first (but not last) Apple product.  it is beautiful.  it is tiny, weighs almost nothing, thin, and has a good 4-6 hours of battery life.  it has an Apple logo that lights up on the back when in use.  it has a battery light so you can check the charge when it is closed and in sleep mode.  it is tiny details like these that make it a joy to own.

in the movie "back to the future," the professor says "i figured if you are going to build a time machine you might as well do it with a little style."  somewhere in some office at Apple, there is someone, right now, thinking "yeah that does the job, but there is no style to it.  how can i fix that?"  you doubt me?  go in to an apple store, or reseller, and look at the ibook.  look at the flat screen imac.  look at the powerbook.  look at the ipod.  they have style.  what you won't see unless you actually buy one though, is that that style goes all the way down.  every Apple built application, every product, has style, and the underlieing thought of that style is always "how can this be made easy, and gracefull."  Apple practices random acts of grace and senseless acts of beauty.  that is all there is to it.  using their products makes you want to do the same.  as touchy feely and goodie goodie as that sounds (and yeah i know it does, it just smells of it) it is true.  

and hey, it wouldn't hurt if it rubbed off on everyone else.

Thinking of Switching?