Archives for August 2005

My first computer was an Atari, technically. My actual first personal computer, designed for personal computing, was an Apple IIc with a 5.25″ floppy disk drive. It was a predecessor to the GUI.

I played games on it. That was probably the only thing that I did, until I found that my new best friend, Chad Taylor, also had the same computer. I met Chad about 3 years after I had been given the computer for Christmas. We swapped hundreds of programs and games. Most of my time was spent in Zork, text based adventures; silly programs that you actually typed commands into like, “Pick up rock,” or “Take Jewell Encrusted Egg.” These were simple things. When Chad gave me Appleworks, I began my journey to typing mastery. I typed my MATH homework even. How ridiculous. My parents realized I needed a printer and bought one for me. Dot matrix baby.

A few years later, a handful of my friends ended up with the Macintosh! It had a MOUSE!?! I became creative. I never had one, but I always visited my friends’ houses to use theirs. And most of it was painting, or learning how to use spreadsheets…and an occasional round of Sim City.

As time passed, the IBM PC took over, and I ended up getting sucked into the technical aspect of computing, which led me to computer repair. I focused alot on tearing apart computers. My first IBM compatible was an IBM 8088 with a green monitor. It was with this computer that I wrote my first sequenced music pieces. They are long gone. And so was the creativity and freedom to simply use a computer for what it was intended. The next eighty three gajillion hours was spent on troubleshooting IBM crap! I’m 33 now, and I have recently acquired a Powerbook, and I have slowly migrated most of my creative efforts to that platform. I write music on it, I record on it, I blog on it. There’s nothing I can’t see myself doing on it, EXCEPT, all of the technical crap that my XP platform forces me to deal with. Bottom line, Apple has tapped my creativity and I will probably never use my PC for anything more than serving the web and running my accounting and personal finances. It’s just not as friendly as this beautiful PowerBook!

And just think, only recently was I a die-hard PC freak with words like Macintrash, and Trashintosh oozing from my mouth.

I write more, I create more, I desire more, now that I have the freedom to do so. Computing with a Mac is like driving a rail through the rocks at 100 miles/hour. Computing with a PC is like riding a tricycle on the beach.

(P.S. There’s a better analogy than that, but it’s freaking 1:30 in the morning and I’m tired.)

Good Night!