Rick's World

continued from my previous blog...

Despite my renewed interest in all things Apple, I still didn't buy a Mac, for the same reasons I didn't buy one back in my college days - money. I loved Apple's design of PCs and iPods. They really seemed to have a talent for designing truly cool looking hardware. However, I couldn't justify to myself the $2000 or more expense of buying a toy to play with. That all changed in January of 2005.

In January of 2005, Apple came out with the Mac Mini. I was blown away by this cool little computer. The entire computer was not much bigger than the CD burner drive in my PC and it had some impressive capabilities. Plus, they finally removed the last barrier to me buying one. They made a Mac available for $500. They finally eliminated the money issue for me. I kept an eye on them for the next several months. Finally a week and a half ago, as you've no doubt figured out by reading my last few blogs, I bought one. It was love at first sight. Why? To me the Mac was the best of all the operating systems I'd encounted in my entire career of working with computers - It had the rock-solid stability of Linux, it had the graphical appearance of Windows, and it had the incredibly cool design of Apple. I've since started to teach myself how to program on the Mac.

Now, you may ask, why in the world would I waste time programming on a Mac, when I make my living programming on a PC? You could ask the same question as to why I learned how to program on Linux. It all goes back to the issue I mentioned earlier about programmers writing Linux for free. Programmers program because they enjoy it, and find it something interesting to do. That is why I've experimented with programming on every operating system I've ever encountered. I like programming, and I'm always curious to see what you can do with these different operating systems. I've been programming on one computer or another since I was 11 years old.

I started this whole blog as a way of explaining my seeming indecisiveness in what kind of computers I've used over the years. I've used a Texas Instruments TI-994A (a 32K computer connected to a TV as a monitor). I've used a Commodore 64. I've used a Commodore 128. I've used DOS. I've used Windows (many versions of it!) I've used Linux. I've used mainframes. I've even started using Macs. I've programmed to some degree on all of them. Many people would think that since most of my life I've owned only PCs running DOS (and then Windows) that I'm an exclusive PC guy. I'm not. It just so happened that since I made my living off of PCs that they were where most of my focus is. However, throughout my life, I've always been interested in, and used many other operating systems and computer architectures. I hope that this long winded blog has given you some idea as to the foundations for my interest in many computers.