14 DAY TRIAL // Yes, it's true, I am biased, I am partial, I love Macs. Over the years, I have had many Macintosh machines sitting on my desk, from a Performa 430 to a Dual G5. I have worked on them, played on them and created on them, and while arguably, I could have worked played and created on just about any kind of computer, I know it would have never been the same.
Computers have been a solitary journey of discovery to me. I still remember when I would go sifting through my files to delete something whenever I got the message telling me that I needed another few hundred kilobytes of memory to launch an application? Yes, I was that ignorant and I didn't even know the difference between hard drive space and RAM, but I was using my computer nevertheless.
From here on it gets blurry, and as time went by I went from making icons to changing or assigning keyboard shortcuts in menus of applications, using Resedit, because I needed to access that command faster. And during this time, I watched my friends go from Dos to Windows 95. I still remember looking at that Norton Commander in shock and asking where the icons were and why on earth he was not using a mouse. And on my first encounter with Windows, the one before 95, I laughed so hard and then, when I realized that it was not some sort of a joke I panicked.
Back then, you only really needed one mouse button, the scroll wheel was a thing unknown and pretty much all the major applications were developed for both platforms. The rift between Macs and PC was still small. It didn't matter whether your mouse plugged into the keyboard or directly into the computer, many people were still not using a mouse, because in Dos, you just didn't need it and multi-tasking was unimportant because the average user only worked in three programs. The differences were there from the very beginning, but it did take some time for them to be felt by the end user.
The only difference that I did feel then, and do feel now, was all the games that those PC users had access to and I didn't.
When I got my Performa 575, everything changed. I remember still having a hard time getting used to the idea that a CD could hold almost three times more information than my internal drive. I remember the MacFormat magazines that came with a CD and the endless hours of information and programs they offered. I reveled in the applications and information and content, I customized every aspect of my Mac, I even toyed with the system making minor changes with Resedit. The next step came natural, and the step to creating my own content was not a decision or a thought that just occurred to me, or anything. It was a bend in the river, with the water flowing from one direction but heading off in another.
I began meeting other people who had a Mac, and we showed each other our computers with pride. Each of those Macs looked different than mine, each was customized and each pas personalized, and every Windows 95 computer I saw looked the same. All my PC friends were playing this or playing that or talking about some new program that came out. I still had my games, and played them and tried out new programs, but on the side, I was writing, image editing and laying out documents. If there was a school play, I would be the one to design and layout the flyers and posters, every project or presentation I had for school would come out of my Mac with images and diagrams, and everything I did with my computer was either a creative effort or something that wound up leading to one.
This will surely sound like pure personal drivel to anyone who reads it and is not a Mac user; it is not. I still remember a bold headline in an Apple presentation? You have 365 bones in your body; surely at least one of them must be creative. While I do not remember the exact number of bones that are in the human skeleton, and 365 is an approximation, the essence of the idea has stuck firmly to me. Macs are all about leaving aside the inconsequential details and focusing on the important thing, the idea. It doesn't exactly matter how many bones you have in your body, what matters is that the creative one gets out and expresses itself.
My Mac is like my body, I don't know exactly what is inside or any of the specific numbers, but what I do know is that there is a creative one in there and that this machine has always brought the best of it out?
