When Randy Met Mac- Randy
Peterson
Back in 1983, there were two opposing camps of users in my high
school computer science room. It was the first year our small rural
school had offered computer classes, and the classroom had been
outfitted with two Commodore 64s and two TRS-80 Model IVs. (The Apple
II, though arguably the dominant computer in education at the time,
was well out of our price range, and the nearest Apple service center
was at least two hours away.) Appropriately enough, the two species
of machine paired up on opposite ends of the room. TRS-80s the right;
Commodores on the left. For whatever reason, I spent most of my time on the TRS-80. Maybe
all those PEEKs and POKEs on the Commodore troubled me. I don't know.
Soon, the Commodore users became the targets of ridicule from the
right side of the room. Color? Sheesh! What a bunch of babies! We
went on writing our BASIC programs on our green-on-black screens,
convinced of our superiority. When the Macintosh was announced the following year and
"user-friendly" became a media buzzword for the first time, we were
equally unimpressed. "User-friendly? More like user-stupid!" we said.
After all, what good were computers if just anybody could use
one? I entered college in 1985. For most students at the small school I
attended, using a computer meant sitting in front of a VAX terminal
in the main computer lab writing term papers with MASS-11 and
occasionally sending electronic mail to each other. Our early
sophomoric email messages were limited to the campus network, since
the school's BITNET connection was unavailable and largely unknown to
mere students. The school newspaper did have a Macintosh, however, and I did get
to play with it one afternoon in 1987. It was a Mac
Plus, and the faculty advisor for the paper  had
offered to let me use it for a project I was working on. The project
fell through, but my attitude toward the Macintosh softened a bit.
The choice of fonts was staggering. I think it had six. I also really
liked that talking moose that kept popping up on the screen. My interests took me in other directions, however, and I soon
found myself in the physics lab, learning 6502 assembly language
programming on an Apple IIe. I truly liked that machine. There was
some really cool software available for it, and while it seemed much
less stern and businesslike than the old TRS-80 I once used, it still
had a green-on-black screen, so I didn't feel too far out of my
element. Also, the assembly language I was learning was arcane enough
that the (ugh!) friendliness of the machine didn't threaten my
feeling of superiority when I used it. During my junior year in college, I started looking around for a
computer to buy. A used Apple IIe was impossible to find and way out
of my budget. I learned, however, that the Commodore was also based
on the 6502, and the assembly language was practically identical.
Since my main goal was to continue to learn assembly, I finally
bought a used Commodore SX-64 for $300. It was an odd, portable
version of the 64, and while I never did much assembly language
programming on it, I played an awful lot of Ghostbusters and Zork,
and I even wrote a few papers with Speedscript. In 1990, I started
graduate school, and the Commodore went with me. In graduate school, I was a graduate assistant in the Special
Education department, and once again I crossed paths with  the
Macintosh. The secretary's machine was a Macintosh
SE with a hard drive. Accustomed to meager student account quotas
and tiny floppies, the storage seemed limitless -- all 20 megabytes
of it. I used the machine after hours and when the secretary was out,
and I soon fell in love (with the Mac, not the secretary). Maybe I had grown older and feeling superior was no longer
important to me. Maybe I finally had real work to do, and getting it
done was more important to me than the mental exercise of coaxing a
computer into submission. In any event, in spite of my youthful
contempt for "user-friendliness" and my love of text-based interfaces
with green-on-black displays, the next computer I bought was a
Macintosh. With a student discount and money from a night job, I
bought a Macintosh Classic and
never looked back. Since then, that first Classic has been followed by a PowerBook
160, a Performa 475, a
Power Macintosh 7100, and, most
recently, a used SE much like the one that finally hooked me for
good. These days, when I need to feel superior to others, I have Windows
98 at work. It satisfies my need to impress others with my ability to
solve complex puzzles. When I'm not being paid for my time and I want
to actually enjoy using a computer, I sit down in front of my
Mac. Occasionally I do feel a little nostalgic, and I bring up a
green-on-black telnet session to the VAX at the university where I
now work. After a wistful sigh and a few minutes of actually trying
to use the thing, it usually goes away.
My First Macintosh- My First Mac Clone, Spencer, 8/15/00.
Sometimes your first Mac isn't even made by Apple.
- Midlife Mac lover, Chris Volpe, 7/18/00.
"I once vowed I'd never own a computer, but that began to change
when I left journalism in 1998...."
- Salute to a Classic II, Max Thom Stahl,
7/11/00. "What I remember most was the games."
- When Randy met Mac, Randy Peterson,
7/4/00. "Maybe I finally had real work to do, and getting it done
was more important to me than the mental exercise of coaxing a
computer into submission."
- The Cure for "Mac Envy," Dave Beekman,
6/28/00. "After almost ten years, I've finally found the cure for
Mac envy: buy a Mac."
- My First Mac index
Want to share your story on My First Mac? Send email to
dan.knight@lowendmac.com. Recent New Content on LEM- Building rumors, fooling
Slashdot, Anne Onymus with Dan Knight, 8/18. We didn't set out
to fool Slashdot or anyone else -- and we explain how to build
your own rumors.
- Don't upgrade that Quadra
630, Adam Robert Guha, Apple Archive, 8/18. Most upgrades for
this particular model just don't make economic sense.
- Browse different, Dan
Knight, Mac Musings, 8/18. One way browsers could improve the Web
surfing experience.
- Mac-N-DOS list. Yes, it's
a bad pun, but if you have to use both Macs and Windows, this new
list could be a great resource.
- New iMacs: Something for
everyone, Kel Taylor, Mac to the Future, 8/17. "...the iMac
has grown into a family, and a large one at that."
- Apple ditching G4, Anne
Onymus, 8/17. Apple embraces IBM and the G5, leaving Motorola
behind.
- Happy Birthday, iMac!, Dan
Knight, iMac Channel, 8/16. "The iMac has redefined the industry
and redefined Apple as a trendsetter."
- Be thankful for Apple
secrecy, Stephen Van Esch, Mac Scope, 8/16. There really is a
good side to Apple secrecy.
- The Land Before Silicon,
Manuel Mejia, Mac Daniel, 8/16. Travels in Russia with a PowerBook
100.
- The G4 Cube and Radeon fans,
Paulo Rodrigues, Tangerine Fusion, 8/16. How ATI spilled a trade
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First Mac index>
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