The Mac vs. PC "war" has been going on since many of us were still in grade school. As for me, I've been torn between the two for about that long. But switching back and forth for me was in large part a combination of necessity and desire. Let me explain.
I learned to run PC-DOS, program BASIC, and write Pascal programs on the original IBM PC in 1982. In those days, you got text with a text graphics card and bare-bones color graphics with a CGA adapter, and I thought it was the height of cool that I could play Microsoft Flight Simulator during downtime. I was so smitten with the new tech that when the ill-fated PCjr came out, I almost convinced my parents to get us one.
Soon after that, my buddy John showed me an article in Creative Computing magazine about an upcoming computer called Macintosh from the company that produced our "ancient" Apple II computers. I didn't think much about it, since Apple was obviously yesterday's news, and the future of the PC was all in IBM's hands. Apple II was a dying, closed-off system, while the IBM PC was the system that both businesses and consumers thought of when they thought of computers.
Then I got a summer job at a local Computer Depot, and consequently got some hands-on time with the Macintosh. The first-generation 128K Mac was underpowered, to be sure, but the new graphics interface sure beat having to type DOS commands just to get to the word processor and modem terminal program. Call me fickle, but when I "got it," the way was clear: Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were the wave of the future. For college, I chose a brand-new Apple Macintosh Plus. It had the power the original Mac lacked, and by that time there were enough software packages to make it useful. I mean, MacPaint and MacWrite were cool, but you need to do other things like connect with CompuServe, right? That Mac saw me through college, with an 800K floppy disk drive, a 20GB SCSI hard drive, various modems, Apple ImageWriter printer, and 4MB memory upgrades along the way. I upgraded to a Mac Performa 400 while in grad school. But, alas, the real world waited.
My first job out of college was as an IT dude at a major record label, where I serviced the art department, which, of course, worked with Macs. I got a crash course in Lotus Notes and saw how a mixed PC/Mac environment worked, which wasn't too well in those days. The lines were drawn between the creatives (Macs) and the corporate side (PCs). I still liked the Mac as a platform, but the incompatibilities were maddening. You couldn't reliably get a PC-written Word document to read right on a Mac if you'd done any formatting on it. Even keyboards and monitors were on different, noninterchangeable standards (PS2 versus ADB keyboards, VGA versus DB15 monitors, and the like), leading to walled gardens where the Macs played with each other and the PCs did the same. Networking was just starting to bridge the gap, but the gatekeepers (network managers) absolutely hated that work, so it got done only when necessary.
I learned to run PC-DOS, program BASIC, and write Pascal programs on the original IBM PC in 1982. In those days, you got text with a text graphics card and bare-bones color graphics with a CGA adapter, and I thought it was the height of cool that I could play Microsoft Flight Simulator during downtime. I was so smitten with the new tech that when the ill-fated PCjr came out, I almost convinced my parents to get us one. Soon after that, my buddy John showed me an article in Creative Computing magazine about an upcoming computer called Macintosh from the company that produced our "ancient" Apple II computers. I didn't think much about it, since Apple was obviously yesterday's news, and the future of the PC was all in IBM's hands. Apple II was a dying, closed-off system, while the IBM PC was the system that both businesses and consumers thought of when they thought of computers.
Then I got a summer job at a local Computer Depot, and consequently got some hands-on time with the Macintosh. The first-generation 128K Mac was underpowered, to be sure, but the new graphics interface sure beat having to type DOS commands just to get to the word processor and modem terminal program. Call me fickle, but when I "got it," the way was clear: Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were the wave of the future. For college, I chose a brand-new Apple Macintosh Plus. It had the power the original Mac lacked, and by that time there were enough software packages to make it useful. I mean, MacPaint and MacWrite were cool, but you need to do other things like connect with CompuServe, right? That Mac saw me through college, with an 800K floppy disk drive, a 20GB SCSI hard drive, various modems, Apple ImageWriter printer, and 4MB memory upgrades along the way. I upgraded to a Mac Performa 400 while in grad school. But, alas, the real world waited.
My first job out of college was as an IT dude at a major record label, where I serviced the art department, which, of course, worked with Macs. I got a crash course in Lotus Notes and saw how a mixed PC/Mac environment worked, which wasn't too well in those days. The lines were drawn between the creatives (Macs) and the corporate side (PCs). I still liked the Mac as a platform, but the incompatibilities were maddening. You couldn't reliably get a PC-written Word document to read right on a Mac if you'd done any formatting on it. Even keyboards and monitors were on different, noninterchangeable standards (PS2 versus ADB keyboards, VGA versus DB15 monitors, and the like), leading to walled gardens where the Macs played with each other and the PCs did the same. Networking was just starting to bridge the gap, but the gatekeepers (network managers) absolutely hated that work, so it got done only when necessary.
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