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First, a confession. I am a PC person. I have been since 1992,
and it is unlikely to change anytime soon, if for no other reason
than you can't get "UFO: Enemy Unknown" for the Mac.
But this lifelong PC abuse was what actually prompted me to buy
a Mac - just out of idle curiosity. I had never used a Mac before,
and so I wanted one. I nearly bought a Revision C iMac during the summer, but
Apple wouldn't give me credit. And as I didn't have £600 to
spare, my Mac-owning ambitions were put on indefinite hold.
Until about a month ago. While perusing
eBay looking for something completely unconnected with
computers (I think I was looking for a bike, actually), I clicked
into the Mac section by accident. I started to browse, and then I
saw it - the one.
Okay, it was only a Power Mac
7200/75 with 8 MB of RAM and a 512 MB hard drive. On the plus
side, it was only £50 including postage and monitor. So I
bought it at 03.57 p.m. and logged onto UX-MA117-12 (the Sun Ultra5
workstation I had to use for my university Java course). In due
course, and after no small number of irritated phone calls, it
arrived. My defection began.
I have to say, when it arrived I was roundly unimpressed. It was
big. Well, not really, but my PC is a dinky little laptop. And
compared to that, this Mac was a monster. To this day the system
unit lurks under my desk. It had no CD drive. And System 7.5 took
about three days to boot. If I wasn't a compulsive geek, I would
have run away. But it was a new gadget and thus worthy of my
attention.
It was booted up, and, on seeing the smiley Mac beaming at me, I
duly christened it: Macinpi (mac-in-pie. Sounds cute, don't you
think?). Once the Finder revealed itself, I began to play. It was
new, different - and confusing. Where was my taskbar? Which button
is minimise? And where is my command prompt?
The really baffling thing, to start with, was having to shut
down applications from the menu bar instead of just closing the
window. Bizarre. And the sheer, painful slowness of doing anything
meant that it didn't get used.
Fast forward to last Wednesday. I had invested in a 2 gig hard
drive, a CD drive, and 24 MB of memory. After learning the black
art of SCSI setup, and having cobbled all the bits together
together, I turned it on again. And it was beautiful. No longer
could I read a chapter of Red Storm Rising while it booted. No
longer did it take 5 minutes to scroll to the bottom of the Stuffit
readme.
It was finally usable, and the use was good. Setting up TCP/IP
for the university network was a little challenging, but, in fact,
challenging is the wrong word. It took me less time to set it up
than Win2k took to load the Network control panel. There was only
one thing left to do - find a copy of Stuntcopter. (This was the
only Mac experience I had ever had before buying one.)
Now I use my Mac daily. I write lab reports on it, I code and
test web pages on it, and it does my SETI@Home number crunching for me.
Links
You can download Stuntcopter from giantmike's Old
Shareware Archive. The author of Stuntcopter passed away some
years ago. The game has been put in the public domain. The password
is: MUHAHA. Stuntcopter even runs on a TiBook with Mac OS 9.1.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: Power Mac G3, Nov. 1997 - The first G3 Power Mac and the last Mac in a beige enclosure.
List of the Day: Mac OS 9 List covers Mac OS 9 as both a freestanding OS and as Classic mode in OS X.
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