Mac Style

My experience of computing has been so affected by this little silver item of beauty that I've actually decided to devote a whole site to share my new obsession.

I suppose a little bit of my background and experiences in platforms would be helpful. I started using computers when I was a young lad, my weapon of choice was the old, faithful, Commodore 64. That eventually grew to a Commodore 128D, a model that was not widely known, but came with a Z80 microprocessor that allowed the system to perform as a 80 column word processor. The 128D was a boring piece of equipment from my perspective, I generally booted into the C64 mode, and pined after the amazing Commodore Amiga 500.

From there came the great XT IBM Compatible. My particular model was a turbo, 8GHz from memory, with a suped-up 640kb RAM. It had a very clear, although uninspiring, orange monochrome screen. It played Prince of Persia great, and I enjoyed the Microsoft Paint program, Word 5.0, and DOS 3.3. It was my first of many PCs that I either owned or interacted with. As a side note, it had nothing on my C64, no real sound, no real graphics, a real step backwards, but it did get me good marks in high school as I could write up my assignments in Word.

My next beast of computing was the 486 DX 33, originally it had 4Mb of RAM and a SVGA monitor. I realised how much fun Doom was, and eventually upgraded to my first Sound Blaster card and 8Mb of RAM. A great machine that now gave me a smooth Doom experience. After a going through a few CTRL keys, I also ended up upgrading various bits and pieces like a DX4 100, CD drive, and an additional 800Mb hard drive alongside the original 200Mb.

I then went to a Pentium 200 MMX, then a Celeron 366. My main desktop computer these days is a highly modified version of the original Celeron 366 upgraded to a 1.8GHz on a BX motherboard using a great little adapter that enabled the conversion.

Continue to Part II...