figby.com

I’ve wanted an Apple Macintosh since the day they came out in 1984. I was in High School and my computer at the time was an 8-bit Atari. Barring a lottery win, there was no way I was going to afford one, so I forgot about that.

The next time I seriously considered buying a Mac was in 1992 when I saw a Performa 600 in a store. At the time my computer was an Atari ST, and I dreamed of owning a computer with better software support and better specs—32 mHZ, 4 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive.

Shortly thereafter I got a job working with PCs, then got a PC, and I’ve stuck with the Windows platform for various reasons. Meanwhile, Apple has kept making better machines and better operating systems, and I’ve been thinking for a while that I should have a Mac handy for testing my web sites. So when my PC notebook died, I ordered an ibook G4.

I’ve gone through ten or so computers over the years, but I must admit I’m excited to finally try a Mac. No, I’m not switching, and I refuse to enter any religious debate about which system is better. I’ve always been platform agnostic—I do as much work on Linux as on Windows—and this is one more platform I ought to have an understanding of. Besides, all of the cool kids seem to have them.

So, I’ve created a Macintosh category here and will be occasionally writing about some of my experiences and discoveries on that platform. I have seldom used Macs at all and never used OSX, so it should be interesting.