The Omni Group

In Macs, when I was 3 and doing stuff my dad couldn't do on them, in software, when I was 8 and made my first game using Apple Works paint tool and Apple Media Tool

I forgot: I first became somewhat interested in Macs when Mathematica came out, much earlier than the Performa.

I became a freak about macs when I got my hands on a new PowerBook with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner bundled thereon.  Seriously the Omni software did 70% of the sale.

I've been using computers since 1985, but came in contact with my first Mac in 1989 (mind you, this was not my first Apple computer, just first Mac).  And for 7 glorious and blissfully naïve years, I knew nothing but Macs (and the Tandy machines my family and my friend owned, which ran DOS 3!).  It wasn't until 1996 that I finally was exposed to Windows 95.  That same year I received a PC loaded with Win95.  For the next several years I suffered the wrath of Windows until I became violently sick of it, and turned my attention back to the Mac when the original Bondi blue iMac came out.  I played with this lovely machine, and was enamored with it.  Look, a Help system that actually works!  A system that doesn't force me to reboot 9 times before it will start running!

I bought my first two Macs in 1999, a PowerMac in 2001, an iBook in 2002, an eMac in 2004, and I also picked up some older systems along the way.

My first Mac ...  ... It was the late 80's, and we were at war. The White Coats (those of us working with big iron in computer rooms) were losing ground to the White Shirts (with their short sleeves and fancy pocket protectors), who were trying to annex our territory to the land of Desktops - where raised floors and extreme A/C were just myths and legends.

I joined the putty colored resistance. There we were, in our Bart Simpson t-shirts, reading Bloom County, and hoping that the Banana Junior 6000, or the Billy and the Boingers' album were real. Our mission kept changing, but was eventually called 'System 7'. Not everyone made it through 'System 7', but there are always casualties in war ...  ... those were the days.

Mac? Pfft. Do those things even have color screens?! Apple II forever!

Actually, when Beale Bros. released BeagleWorks for Mac, that's when I switched. Or was it when OmniWeb 4.5 came out? Well, it was one of those two..

I tell you what, though, when Woz returns to Apple and finally pushes the Apple IIGS+ out the door, I'm switching back.

I started when I was about 13 or so, by copying snippets of html from various Nintendo webpages and putting them together to make some kind of collage html file, with images and links to the whatever games had the coolest artwork (I shudder to even imagine what the html I came up with looked like, as at that point I didn't understand enough html to make some text appear bold…) Eventually I got bored of html and upgraded to writing AppleScript by “recording” a task in Finder, then messing with the code to see what will happen (the absolute *best* way to learn programming! I wish recordable apps had made the transition to OS X). It was something like 2 years later that I found this thing called a “tutorial” on the internet, which is an amazing type of article which would walk you through a programming task step-by-step! Wow!!

Boy those days were fun! Eight years later and I'm a freelance developer who mostly works with dynamic websites for small to medium businesses and the occasional corporation. I also have quite a lot of cocoa experience, and hope to eventually move away from php (yuk!) and into the world of client side software (I'm thinking I'll focus on creating tools for web developers).

In 1984 I was in 4th grade and the original Mac was released. My dad was doing work for a small publishing company and they sent us one to try out. I got addicted to MacPaint and the rest is history.

First computer personal computer was long long ago.  It was a PDP-10 and you could use it all by yourself for a while at night, in the machine room.  It was perhaps half a dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets.  An early minicomputer.  I still have a few old joke mails in my mail file from the late 1970s…

BUT more importantly: teach your kid German.  My kid had many books on subjects like tractors, animals, etc.  Who knew that the Germans had such a rich ontology of earth-moving apparatus?  And he wanted me to drill him for hours on end…or rather he would drill _me_: he'd point to a picture and I would have to tell him what it was. 

Over and over again.

I was so happy when he (finally) learned how to read.  They don't believe in teaching 'em even the alphabet until 1st grade where he's in school (knives and saws and drills and such on the other hand are apparently A-OK).  And _I_ don't believe in exposing him to computers until he's 10 or so.  Hopefully the “desktop” will actually be a metaphor rather than a bizarre abstraction!

My parents got our house's first computer the year after I was born, and as it had built-in BASIC I can't remember when I wasn't a hacker.  On the other hand, I didn't realise it was the career for me until I got to the computing lab at University and it was filled with NeXTs.  I'm now an ObjC hacker ;-)

Software - began with the venerable WordStar and BASIC on some version of Concurrent CP/M-86 in early 1987. (Amazingly, so many of those key sequences I learned in WordStar,  like ^E to jump to end of line, ^A to the start, ^U to kill a line and ^W to kill a word, are right there in the command shell you use in the Mac OS X Terminal. But they call 'em Emacs bindings instead of Wordstar. It's a funny world.) Writing gigantic, monolithic BASIC programs was at least as much fun as actually running them, or playing them, as they were mostly games ...

My first Mac encounter would have been in the early 90's, as a school friend had some species of Mac at home that his dad had for his university teaching. I began using them regularly myself in 1995 when I began university and bought my first one, an LC375, in 1996. It's still on a shelf. =)

All right. I'm a boomer. So sue me:

1965 bad experience with Fortran

1967 more keypunch misery

1970 glimpse of mysterious TV-like screen, while ambitions focused on getting access to IBM Selectric typewriter for thesis

1971 more keypunch misery

1972 more keypunch misery

1973 sightings of exotic 4 function electronic calculators at prices of Mac Mini in nominal, non-inflation adusted dollars (i.e., fully tricked out Macbook Pro)

1974 my first programmable HP-25

1975 communicating (115 baud) IBM mag card typewriter

1976 HP-67

1978 first fax, Wang word processor

1979 first sighting of Apple II

1980 IBM S/34, 800 lbs, green on black CRTs with phospor burn-in

1981 Osborne, CP/M, Wordstar, Supercalc and the rest

1982 .... PC with DIY memory upgrades requiring inserting chips individually onto motherboard, BASIC, Pascal, dBase II

1984 DEC micro PDP-11 with a v.7 UNIX, first root, sh, C

1985 VAX mini (shudder)

1990 PCs ........... DOS, Windows 2.x, 3.x, NT 3.5, 95

1996 SGI Indy workstation, back to my roots, httpd, ldap, mail, certificate serving, Perl

1998 PCs ........... 98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, blue screens

2005 Got a iPod shuffle, got a mini, grew a beard, got an iPod, got the last of the Powerbook G4s

2006 official Mac Bigot

2007 installing MySQL, R, considering Ubantu