My First Mac

Still Waiting

mas - 2001.01.23

I am still waiting for my first Mac.

My first Mac was not mine. I married it, or, to be precise, my fiance bought a new 7100/66 shortly before we married. I had earlier owned a PC (286, 32 MB hard drive, upgraded to 1 MB ram - I wrote two theses on it) and worked at a place with Windows 3.11 as standard.

I did not like the Mac. Yes, it looked the part, but I did not understand why it had to do things differently. And I found it was often slow, and it crashed all the time. Anyway, I did not use it much during the next couple of years, until I had to help my wife finish her thesis. I came to accept it, but still found it unstable compared to the Windows machine at work.*

We then moved from Britain to Denmark, and in 1998 I changed career from chemical engineering to IT/Web. I argued that we should get an Internet connection, and at the same time I installed a CD-ROM drive and a new video card, got a new screen, and upgraded RAM (from 8 to 40 MB) and OS (from 7.1 to 8.1). Now that helped on speed and stability!

I grew to like the interface and the elegant solutions, the true plug and play, and even if I don't hate Windows (a good thing, since I work on Windows NT daily), I now prefer the Mac. My wife only complained that it did not feel like her machine anymore.

Last year we found a good offer on a 7500/G3 and sold the 7100. Before we could stand the smell of our "new" computer, I had to take it apart and clean it inside and outside - the previous owner was a chain-smoker, and that was obvious from the Mac. In December I bought a PowerBook 3400c for my wife, as she will soon be travelling a lot; I am still waiting to have my first Mac.

Perhaps when the G4 PowerBook gets a few years old?

* Try to run Office 4.2.1 on a PPC with 8MB RAM and you will understand my first impression.