Entry 480, on 2007-02-22 at 17:37:30 (Rating 2, Computers)
I have always been a big fan of Apple equipment. Well, actually, I have really only been one since about 1981 when I narrowly avoided joining the dark side after recommending the original IBM PC to the company I was working for. They ignored my advice (thank you) and bought two Apple IIs for the same price, and after working with those for a while I was invited to work for the local Apple dealer. Since then I have never felt the need to stray far from the Apple path and have been increasingly critical of the PC world - although I've been more critical of Microsoft than the hardware manufacturers.
So what's so cool about Apple? That's where its all happening. I listened to a podcast today which was discussing podcasting and how it had been largely driven by the Mac platform. Then I thought about how many other new technologies came from the Mac world, and I realised that I've been on the cutting edge my whole career, to a large extent because I use Apple computers.
I used spreadsheets for real work before the IBM PC even existed because I was one of the original users of VisiCalc on the Apple II. How many people know that Microsoft copied the idea from VisiCorp and created Multiplan, then Excel, which eventually killed the original spreadsheet program?
I did desktop publishing because only the Mac had PageMaker, laser printers (NZ$20,000 for the original Apple LaserWriter), and a real graphical interface. This was long before the PC followed.
I wrote programs which used a windowing style interface for the Apple II and Apple III (based on the ideas I had seen on the Lisa, which I also used) before Windows was even available for PCs.
I had one of the first private web sites in this area because the Mac made it so easy to work with the graphics and text required (although I don't think the Mac was such a driver in this technology, Unix was and that's what we are now using with Mac OS X, so the Mac sort of acquired importance in this area later).
More recently I have been an early adopter of blogging, podcasting, and other new technologies. Sometimes this was because the technology originated in the Apple world, and sometimes because it was because I just like to play with new ideas, but I'm sure if I hadn't been an Apple user I would have been left behind like many of my PC colleagues.
So when I sit in a cafe amongst all the dreary PCs and the prominent Apple logo glows on the front of my MacBook Pro I don't feel like an unimportant minority - instead I enjoy the superior feeling that goes with Apple pride!
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