My first Mac was a Performa
5320, but it was far from being my first computer. That dubious
honour belongs to a Commodore VIC-20. This was followed a few years
later by an Amstrad CPC 6128, which was probably the first computer
I actually did anything much on.
However, by this stage my school had been kitted out with a
selection of Macintosh
Classics. Oh, how desperately I wanted one. I got an Atari
STFM. The pain of switching between the Mac during the day and the
ST in the evenings was palpable.
Moving onwards and upwards (?), I was given a Tandy 386 laptop,
stupidly swapped it for an ICL 386 desktop, and finally, in 1997 I
bought my first Mac. That Performa 5320 cost me £850 sterling
second hand. This was probably one of the worst machines Apple
ever produced, but I didn't realise that at the time, for a number
of reasons.
Firstly, it came with a boatload of software including,
essentially, Quark Xpress 3.32 and Photoshop 3.0.
Secondly, by this stage I was studying for my degree in Fine Art
at the University of
Ulster, and though I was using exotic machines from Silicon
Graphics and top of the range Power Macs every day, they were so
badly clogged with garbage that they were no faster than my
faithful little machine.
Most days I would take my work home with me on Zip disks and
work in Photoshop in the evenings. That is, until I got connected
to the Internet at home.
Prior to this, I'd been using the Internet for largely research
purposes in the rarefied atmosphere of the library at the Queen's University of
Belfast. However, I wasn't actually entitled to use their
computers, being a student at a different institution - it just so
happened that their campus was closer to my abode. Sometime around
1997 they installed password protection on their systems, and my
freebooting days were over.
Once I had a phone line installed in my grotty student flat,
work ground to a halt for several months. It was during this time I
discovered that the Internet, far from being a panacea for all of
the ills in society, is a mixture between a very boring lecture and
an open sewer. Still, it has its uses, even if it does confirm that
I'm not very interested in most things.
During the latter half of my degree course, I started working as
a video editor for a local company. Their setup was primitive, to
say the least, being an assemble edit system consisting of two high
end Panasonic VCRs, a mixing desk, a titler, and an edit
controller. I managed to 
persuade the
boss to upgrade to a nonlinear system based on Adobe Premiere
running on a Power Macintosh
G4/400. Well, actually we ordered a G3/350, but it never
arrived, and the reseller, now bankrupt, was so embarrassed that
they gave us their first G4 for the lower price of the G3. The G4
is still in use today, cranking out video productions every
week.
Last year I went through what can only be described as some sort
of technological nervous breakdown, and bought several old Macs,
including a French PowerBook
1400c (well, I was in France), an LC, and even a little Mac Classic, just
like the ones I'd used in school.
To tell you the truth, I rarely use any of them these days and
don't really know what to do with them. My iMac Rev. B and two SGI
workstations, an Indy and an Indigo 2, keep me busy enough.
My career has been schizophrenic, to say the least. I'm a
practising new media visual artist, which is why I own the SGI
boxes, a working journalist, and a doctoral candidate at a
university in Ireland. Aside from all of this, I've also worked for
the government and in a field tangental to nuclear medicine, albeit
in a rather dull capacity.
It's difficult for me to explain how I feel about Macs. Like
most Mac users, I have an almost emotional attachment to my
computers, but I still think that the Mac zealotry which I come
across is terribly annoying. They're just machines.
Perhaps it's just because I'm not a geek; I make my living
largely by writing, and the computer is for me a cross between a
typewriter and a canvas. I'm sure that in 50 years, social
anthropologists will have a lot to say about the Cult of Mac. For
better or for worse, I fear I'll never be a member.
In case you're wondering, the Performa is now in my father's
possession, and he's gradually learning to use it, despite being
constantly busy for no immediately apparent reason, and to this day
I've never actually bought a brand new Mac.
has a wide
range of interests and shares his thoughts on Linux on PowerPC Macs
with his weekly PPC Linux
column here on Low End Mac.
