View From The Porch: This week's column is up...

Friday, July 11, 2008

This week's column is up...

...at LEM, in which I come dangerously close to fangirlishness.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...: Nice. I ow you a picture of some early computer technology. I'm going to go try to get it now.; 8:25 PM, July 11, 2008
Tam said...: I may not be able to boast about minicomputers in the '70s, but I've had home PCs around pretty much as long as there have been home PCs to have (unless someone has Altair experience; I only go back to the PET/Apple/Timex-Sinclair daze...); 9:46 PM, July 11, 2008
the pawnbroker said...: i lack the computer nerd gene, but even i can appreciate that your final answer "better by design" applies whether the subject hardware is a vintage mac, an old browning, or a bubbleback rolex; you know it when you see it, touch it, feel it...

and of course that beautiful prose has a "b.b.d." aura of its own...

jtc; 10:09 PM, July 11, 2008
Anonymous said...: Post up. Less pretty picturtes than yours, but a less pretty item. And the dustiness of my crawlspace.; 11:43 PM, July 11, 2008
Scott said...: I seem to think that your Mac addiction is similar to my HP calculator addiction. I collect old "classic" and a few of the newer HP calcs. They have some of the same practical design features and well thought out engineering that the Apples have. Plus, I learned to first program on an HP 25 when I was a senior in high school. Sure that dates me a little, but RPN rules.; 1:09 AM, July 12, 2008
Tam said...: Aren't those the calculators that use Hungarian Programming?; 4:29 AM, July 12, 2008
Alchemyst said...: Although it seems that I'm a generation or so older I loved my first Apple (IIRC it was an Apple II.) It was Wozniacks baby and completely open. I could change anything and often did. One could build a completely unique card to do strange and wonderful things. It was 8 bit heaven. Then came the dreaded conversion over to the Mac. A completely closed system in which I could do none of the stuff I longed to do.
So I bit the bullet and switched over to the PC which was (at the time) as open as the Apple had been.
Bottom line is that I disliked the Mac for the very reasons you seem to like it. Funny, after reading your blog for some time now I would have thought differently.; 10:04 AM, July 12, 2008
Tam said...: Ironically, that's why I went PC instead of Mac back in the day. I liked the infinite configurability of the open architecture. Of course, back then I wanted to build gaming rigs, whereas now I just want something to surf the net and write.

If I ever build another gaming rig, I'm sure I'll build a Wintel machine from scratch.; 10:32 AM, July 12, 2008
Anonymous said...: My first session with a Fat Mac in my advisors office was an exercise in frustration. I grokked "drag a file to the wastebasket = delete" just fine, but I *never* would have assumed doing the same thing with a floppy disk would eject it from the drive. I didn't want to delete data on the floppy, I just wanted the d*mn thing out of the drive!

A few more problems with font size (big enough to read was too big for the department guidelines for senior papers) and I went over to an Amiga at home and an Apollo DomainOS workstation at work. Note that both systems used the same 68000 CPU as a Mac but both could actually multi-task!

I wasn't ready to pay a Cupertino Tax on my systems and peripherals so I moved to MS-DOS and the World of Gates. Now Linux my OS of choice for home.

I heard the all-time best description of a Mac was when I working on a project with a rabid Mac Fanboy. I described working on Win95 like knitting wearing boxing gloves to him and HIS response that working on a Mac was like watching someone else knit!

PS- RPN Rocks! I told an HP calculator guy at their national trade show last month I would INSTANTLY purchase an HP-41CX if they ever put it back on the market.; 6:50 PM, July 12, 2008