It’s done. I’m now officially a mac user. I must admit this has been a while in the making. I had never even considered a mac until they released OSX. The thought of apple moving their OS to a Unix (BSD) backend really appealed to me. To make sense of that statement a little about my history with computers…
Commodore 64 was my first machine. It was a Christmas presant around 1984 I would guess. I almost even remember the day! I certainly remember the many hours typing endless lines of code out of books we found in bargain bins. I have to admit I did not learn much about programming, or much about anything really, but I did pick up the programming bug during those years. C64 Basic was kinda fun.
Next came school. Macs were all the rage there. Pascal was taught as part of senior year computer classes which I believe I did quite well. This is where I started actually programming, being able to turn lines of code into something that actually did something, by myself (no need to mindlessly type code out of a book).
Out of school was TAFE with a 6 month part time course in Visual Basic. Now with the right tools I was able to program database applications with graphical interfaces! Sure it was still basic, but I was developing more interesting utilities. I had even started using the internet and developing HTML based websites at this stage and found a library to help me turn my visual basic programs into DLL files to use with the Microsoft Personal Web Server. Now I could write programs for the web (not that I realised what that really ment at the time). My first (and only) program using this method was a computer system quoting tool for the computer shop I was working at. To be honest I thought it was quite neat. Nothing like that existed at the time from what I can tell, and I think my boss was quietly impressed. We could generate quotes, in house, for customers in seconds rather than minutes (looking up supplier pricelists, getting cost prices, adding margin, writing up the quote etc). A few clicks of dropdown lists, a few checkboxes for options, click submit, click print, a semi-proffessional quote was printed out which we could explain to the customer and stand by the number that was printed out. That experience was fun.
At the same time I was experimenting with Linux. RedHat 5.4 from memory. Either I wasn’t ready for it or it wasn’t ready for me. I just wasn’t experienced enough to even get it to install. I could install windows 95 machines blindfolded (in fact I remember doing at least 2 installations without monitors, I had all the keystrokes practically memorized), I could fix numerous bugs with dos/windows3.11/windows95 machines, I was at the stage where I could fix peoples problems over the phone 90% of the time (although 90% of the problems were printer related and required talking through setting up print drivers). But I did not understand enough about actually how a computer worked to answer the relevant questions in the clunky install process of RedHat 5.4. Soon after I found RedHat 6.0, which I successfully installed and started using. Within a few months I completely wiped my harddrive and used Linux exclusively which was a challenge. It was 6 months before I could actually do the same things I was doing with MSWindows based machines. Frustrating at times, but I stuck at it. This is where I picked up a little perl, and was introduced to PHP.
After getting bored with the small town computer shop work I moved away to attend Uni. I continued to do a lot of perl programming but was also caught up with javascript (for part time employment) and c++ (subject matter). At this stage I was 100% Linux, using MSWindows only at Uni on their machines if I needed to do word or excel.
Moving on to second and third year of Uni introduced me to java, lisp, haskell and assembly. My honours year bought me back to the MSWindows world. It was a requirement for my thesis that I used MSWord with Endnote. I obtained a notebook with windows pre-installed and kept Linux on my PC at home.
This also happened out of Uni. I worked for a web-design company, using their computers which had Windows, developing mainly in ColdFusion and a little PHP. My second job was fulltime PHP, with a supplied laptop which had MSWindows, but also enabled me to maintain a Fedora based server for their website, and a duplicate for the test server. It wasn’t long until I scrapped the MSWindows partition and just went fulltime Linux once again (also running VMWare Server ‘just in case’ some of the windows programs I was using was needed again). My current position has me maintaining linux based servers, so the first thing I did with the supplied computer was to trash it and put linux on it.
I must admit I have spent endless hours over the years fixing issues between linux drivers and hardware which already have windows drivers. Every time it has been extremely satisifying to get things working that seem almost impossible to do. I remember the entire weekend getting the HP laptop to even recognise it had a wireless ethernet card in it. And then the entire next weekend to get it to recognise an encrypted signal. My time was probably worth more than a windows disc, but the satisfaction of getting everything to work using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) was well worth the effort put into it.
However…
I do get frustrated sometimes at how compatible linux drivers are with current hardware, and the lack of certain support of some devices, and the less than satisfactory support of linux on laptop computers. I understand all the arguments, but it is still frustrating that my laptop takes 4 minutes to hibernate (using windows it takes about 30 seconds) and can take up to 10 minutes somedays to come out of hibernation (I suspect its because it had certain usb devices when it was hibernated, and missing those devices on wakeup, but I am not sure). So after some particularly bad news, and feeling like a change is as good as a holiday, and after owning an iPhone for about 4 months and really wanting to get into iPhone development, all thrown into a pot and boiled for a day or two, it was decided that a Mac was a fantastic idea (probably not the best time to actually make decisions, but history will tell if it was a good one or not).
So here I am, with a Mac, writing my first serious blog post.
More experiences to follow…
To be continued…
Tags: mac
The History of Matt and why he became a geek (hehe)