My first true home computer was a Laser 128, which was an Apple // clone - and I loved it. We had quality programs for it, like Bank Street Writer (complete with little click-noises when you typed to satiate typewriter-converts), a mess of MECC educational programs, and even a few games, like Ultima IV (in 4-color!). It had 128K of RAM and no hard disk - and it was like a dream.
Unless, of course, you count my Texas Instruments TI-99-4A as my first computer, which I might - even though it was little more than a game console with a keyboard and embedded BASIC.
When I was getting into junior high, we upgraded to the “pizza box” Macintosh LCII, which I thought was just endlessly entertaining (even though we DID get stuck with one of the less-than-satisfactory 13-inch monitors that didn’t display everything on some programs). It was in FULL COLOR - and it had a 40MB hard disk, took 3.5″ floppies instead of 5.25″ floppies, and played more interesting games - and had digital sound. It could record with the dinky little Mac microphone, and it was the first computer I took online with an external modem and AOL for Mac.
By the time I was in high school, I was getting sick of the slow Mac I had, and was always over at a friends’ house (he had a 486, which he later upgraded to a Pentium 133, I think). We played stuff like Wing Commander Armada and (my favorite) Privateer, and I remember witnessing the transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows ‘95 - what an operating system! It made my Mac System 7 look like a slow, antiquated, boring, lumbering beast of an OS. Windows 95! It runs everything you can think of, and then some! Games came out for it left and right! PCs ran QUAKE, for goodness’ sakes!
So I begged and beggeed my dad to let me work towards getting a Windows PC - and we eventually did, in the form of a Gateway 2000 - it was a Pentium 200 with 128 MB RAM and a 5.1 GB hard disk, and I remember it setting us back a good 3,000 dollars. I loved the thing - I played games on it, surfed the burgeoning World Wide Web, discovered instant messaging programs, and other such things. It was a small dream come true. I was so happy to be away from Macs - goodbye to System 7!
My parents have kept up with the Mac tradition until recently - replacing their old Power Mac (which was running Mac OS 9) with a Dell running Windows XP Home Edition. I was always joking with them and telling them that they have now joined the rest of the universe in buying a Windows machine, and that they’ll never regret switching over on their home computer.
I’ve since then been building my own PCs, perfectly content with changing up components every now and again, and trying to keep up as much as possible (mostly to ensure I can play most games as flawlessly as possible). I love my custom-built P4 2.4GHz - it’s my baby of self-constructed computing power. And it does mostly everything I want it to.
Well, I’m looking into buying a laptop in the near future. It’s become fairly clear to me that I could benefit a lot from what a laptop has to provide. Portability, usefulness, less appropriate for games and therefore less distracting, wireless connectivity is more of a feasible reality than it has been in years past… you know the standard arguments.
Well, wouldn’t you know it - now I’m looking at Macs. PowerBooks. Ti. G4. 17″ screens. With huge hard disks and wonderful software - and Mac OS X is like some kind of fluid dream - something that takes Windows and shoves it into a corner, beats up on it a little bit, makes it look like a complete fool, and looks like a beauty queen all at the same time.
Mac-centricism is a disease - a disease from which I thought I had distanced myself well enough that I would never return to it. I used to have a subscription to MacWorld. IN HIGH SCHOOL. And now, all I can think about is those PowerBooks.
It is a disease.
Ah, well - at least I don’t have any money. All I have to do is save a couple grand from my vicarage slave-wages, and I’ll have one, right?