pseydtonne: Behold the Operator, speaking into a 1930s headset with its large mouthpiece. (Default)
[personal profile] pseydtonne
Someone had posted that he was giving away an old Power Mac from about 1994. I wanted to take it off his hands, but I was too late. I'd been psyching up for getting this thing home, even though it didn't have a hard drive and would be even slower than my old 200 megahertz PC clone. I was going to install Linux PPC on it. I even started getting whistful for my Mac Classic II, my first real computer.

Suddenly, I want a Mac. I shouldn't, right? I'm a geek. Geeks want machines they can strip down, blah blah. Then I see those candy-colored laptops with the handles and Airport doohickies and... I crave.

I miss being able to install software by decompressing it, dragging it somewhere, and just double-clicking on it. I miss preference files in a big Preferences folder. I miss BBEdit, even though it's nothing great compred to the power of a normal text editor. I miss knowing all the files involved with my operating system. I miss saying "System 7 point 1 point 1 with a dot after it".

Maybe I just miss 1993. Maybe I miss being a sophomore in college, when I didn't have to work nine months of the year and having a hardwired 19.2 kbaud internet connection (compared to my 1500/300 cable modem connection, the kind I sell several times a day) was hot scheisse.

Some of you are still Mac heads. I've seen OS X, and it's pretty (but I hear it's not quite all there... something about creator types). I know y'all use OS 9.2.2 when it's time to watch a movie. I can deal with that.

When I think about buying a new computer, I say two things to myself. On one hand, I want to have a wicked fast machine with about a gigabyte of RAM, DVD player, burner, and a sweet video card. On the other hand, I plan to run Linux a lot of the time. I keep Windows (98... nothing stellar) because it's very hard to get certain web sites to work without the latest version of Shockwave. I don't want to reward Bill Gates for finally gettng around to a working operating system. Then again, should I hand all my money to a hardware company that also happens to dabble in software and has a cult thing of its own?

-suggestions please, Dante
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