Revisiting the Macintosh after 8 years away
Note: This actually is turning out to be considerably longer than I anticipated. I will be dividing this article into a five part series. Here’s how they’ll be organized:
Part 1 – Looking back to the early days of my computing life… (Background information)
Part 2 – Readjusting to the MacOS Interface (Navigating the UI, noting differences with Windows as well as previous iterations of MacOS)
Part 3 – Software on the Mac (A look at apps bundled with the system, as well as what else is available from 3rd party vendors)
Part 4 – Mac for the Power User (It’s UNIX with a good Interface)
Part 5 – Final Thoughts & Conclusions
Part 1 – Looking back to the early days of my computing life…
I started my computing life as a Mac user, enjoying the wonders of the Macintosh SE when I was just 5 years old. I crashed it, erased all of my father’s research data, played games and spent hours upon hours exploring its potential. We upgraded directly from the 8MHz beast with 1MB of RAM to the blisteringly powerful (and color!) Macintosh LC3. The jump to an astonishing 25MHz machine with 4MB of RAM in 1993 was more than I could imagine. I was flying! It was this machine that opened me up to the world of The Internet. Here was where I got my first taste of e-mail, web browsing, news groups etc.
As time went on however, I found that my PC friends were beginning to outpace me in terms of capabilities. I always knew I got short-changed on games, but the games I did have absolutely rocked (hey, Myst was built using Apple technology!). The real problems started to crop up when The Internet really started to take off, and it was on the PC predominantly. By 1996 my family was straining under the limits of our aging hardware, especially as I became increasingly interested in how the machine worked and spent a lot of time tweaking the system with ResEdit. In the fall of ’96, we made the switch, we bought a PC. Well, I made the switch, my parents continued to use the Mac for work since all of their files and data were stored in Mac app formats that had no PC equivalent at the time.
I moved to a Pentium 200MHz machine with 32MB of RAM. I couldn’t even comprehend this sort of speed increase. 8 to 25 was massive enough… 25 to 200 though was something entirely different. 300% increase to an 800% increase. I had access to games, to the latest and greatest of the Internet, and I had a machine I could fiddle with that Linux thing I had heard about.
I continued to use Macs in a minor way through High School since that was what they had and I was one of the few students allowed to service machines and fix problems. In college I let them mostly get cast off to the side, I had my uber PC, I didn’t need to use a Mac at all period. I became pretty anti-Mac in this period too since I came off the platform with a very bad taste in my mouth. I left the Mac at possibly the lowest point for the platform as a whole. System 7.5 was pretty crappy. The clone licenses had been revoked. Software companies were abandoning the Mac left and right. Worst of all, The Internet, the obvious future of computing, didn’t seem to have much going on the Mac.
It wasn’t until early 2004 that I started looking at the Mac again. I had firmly established myself as a Linux and Windows user. A Gamer. A power user. So the Mac didn’t offer me much anymore, or so I thought. I had spent some time supporting a smattering of Macs running System 7, 8, 9 and X at my job as IT Guru for the Biochem Dept @ PSU but never really worked much with them. Finally, I decided to try and relearn the platform, so I had the department purchase me a 12” Powerbook for me to get more comfortable with supporting the half of the department that was Mac-based.
I found the new MacOS to be a mix of the familiar from my time long ago as a Mac user, as well as some of the nicer things I picked up from the Linux world. There was some frustration, and a fair bit of readjustment, but the experience was well worth it. I know die-hard PC users will come across this article set and claim that I’m biased because I used a Mac way back when or whatever. Yeah, I may be a bit influenced by that, and the fact that I’m familiar with the basic concepts of an Apple GUI made the transition back easier than it would be for those who only ever used Windows, but I still think I can provide a pretty good look at what MacOS is today as it compares to the other systems out there.
Come back in a day or two to read Part 2 of the series, where I go into the UI in greater depth and point out the nice things, as well as the counterintuitive things I can’t figure out why Apple changed or added.