[ on Macintosh ]

How I Became a Macintosh Enthusiast

How I became a Macintosh user is a strange circle of events. My computing career began in junior high on Radio Shack TRS-80s and Apple II series machines, learning BASIC and then Turbo Pascal. In high school, it was more Apple II work, and I used an Apple IIe at home for the first couple of years of college.

After meeting my wife while in college, I was lured to the dark side by an IBM 8088 running MS-DOS 5.0 and WordPerfect. I continued to use Wintel PCs after college, our next system being a Magnavox 486SX-25 with a whopping 4 MB of RAM and a 120 MB hard drive, running Windows 3.1.

I landed a job at a the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner, Louisiana, doing tech support for their new Windows PCs. I later ended up at CompUSA doing customer service work while trying to work my way into the tech department. There, I discovered Macintosh.

During the slow periods on the customer service desk, I began to read David Pogue's excellent Macs for Dummies. I began to play with the Macs in the tech department when there was someone else to help cover the CS desk.

I ended up back at the Pontchartrain Center, taking on more responsibilities, but by this time I was hooked—I had to have a Mac. A Performa 6115CD found its way into my home in 1994, and I have not been without a Mac since. By 1996, I had sold my 486DX4-100 monster PC, and had gone totally Mac. Today, the only PC in the house is my wife's Toshiba laptop.

My current setup is a G3/266 minitower with 384 MB of RAM, a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 7200 rpm 40 GB hard drive, with standard CD-ROM and floppy drives. A 1991 vintange Radius 20" monitor provides a sharp picture (gotta love the Trinitron tube!), and I have the following externals: Zip, Jaz, APS 4x CD-R, Umax scanner. I also use a tangerine iBook, courtesy of my employer.

Macintosh Evangelism

I wrote a couple of articles at the end of 1998 that were never published. You can read about Broken Windows and how A Bug's Life was bug free.

More will come as I write and dig up what has come before.

You can leave me feedback here

if there is a problem with this site, please contact the webjedi