My First Mac
Working Less with My Mac than with My PC
Ronald Bodinger - February 2002
I was 12 when I bought my first PC. It was a Schneider Euro PC 8086 - 9 MHz and a 3.5" 720k floppy drive. I never used anything different until some fine day around the summer of 1997 when I bought an old Apple LC II with 4 MB RAM and an 80 MB hard drive.
I never used something so simple until then. The first time I booted it up and a nice happy Mac smiled at me, I fell in love! After that I bought several machines: Quadra 900 (a tank), Quadra 800, 840av, 700, a Classic II, a Mac Plus - and then came my first Power Mac, an 8200/120.
I was amazed at the speed of this machine (OS 8.1 installed). It had 32 MB RAM, which I upgraded to 96 MB, and rounded it out with two 2 GB IBM hard drives, a Teac CD burner, and a 1 MB Level 2 Cache.
But I could not play any of the really cool games that I used to play on the PC, so I decided to buy a new Mac in 1998. the B&W G3 running at 300 MHz (which I later speed bumped to 400 MHz without a glitch). It was so fast, I couldn't believe it.
But as time went by, the PeeCee got faster and faster. I made a very wrong decision last year in November - I bought a new Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz, loads of RAM (512 MB), SCSI, TV cards, and lots of other crap.
But it wasn't the same, not even when Windows XP arrived. I couldn't get used to Windows anymore.
Come on, look in the System Folder of Windows - mine was about 4,000 files large. Yes, 4,000!
I'd never seen that on a Mac. Compared to Windows, the Mac OS has more ease of use. Even my 10-year-old brother used it and got more feel for the mouse than on the PC.
But I was a Mac head, so after long night with Windows XP and many faulty drivers, I sold the P4 and bought Dual 800 MHz Quicksilver with a 22" Cinema Display.
And guess what? I work with it less than I did with my PC!
Why? Because I do the work I always do - but without all the problems.
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Recent My First Mac articles
- A Second Spring for PowerPC Macs, 2011.09.28. Apple has abandoned the Classic Mac OS, PowerPC Macs, and PowerPC software, but that doesn't have to mean an end for new development.
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Links for the Day
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