From Mac to PC and Back Again

Have you ever had a really good friend of yours make a bad decision? No matter what you did, you couldn’t convince them to change their mind. Well this is a story of good friend of mine who went to the dark side and came back. -B.H.

Menagerie of Macs

Original Macintosh

Many years ago, actually not too many years ago, I used to own a little 512K Mac. It was one of those all-in-one deals. It was our uncle’s, and he gave it to me. I was really happy when I first saw this grey box with a screen.

I had so much fun fixing it and making it work right that I even tried putting System 6.0.1 on it. This was tough, because it had no hard drive. I had to try to fit System 6 and as many accessories as I could fit on a disk, 800K at that! So what if I did not have a hard drive and everyone made fun of me for it. I had two disk drives; they were really cool.

A few years after having this computer in my house, I decided that I wanted a new one. I would not stop finding things wrong with it and showing them to my mother. “It’s nothing but a typing box with a screen – you can’t do anything else on it!” I used to say any time someone brought up the topic of my computer.

I continued this for three years, and I finally convinced my mother to get me a new computer. Even though I eventually bought my computer at Business Depot, I went to Future Shop first. I remember seeing a Mac on the last shelf in the back row of the building. I was looking at i,t and my dad said, “Why don’t you get a Mac, they’re cheaper.” I told him that they are cheaper because the were dying and their company was going down the hole. Also I said that if I wanted any good games, I would have to pay a lot more to buy the Mac version, if they even had one.

I ended up buying a PC with a Pentium 166, 2.1 gig hard drive, 12x CD ROM, 32 megabytes of RAM, a 2 megabyte video card, and a Sound Blaster Pro sound card.

I have to admit that this computer had served me well, and I still use it. It does everything I want it to do, but this year I became reacquainted with my lost love, the Macintosh. I was in the market for a used laptop; I just wanted something to write on. I went to PCused but found that used PCs are pretty expensive. I think that this is because the used PCs are not that old.

PowerBook 140I went to CPUsed instead, because they seemed to have a lot of customers. I told them what I was looking for, and they showed me this little grey brick with a fruit on top. It was then that I realized that what I needed was a good reliable Mac. So I bought it, and I use my new used Mac PowerBook 140 all the time. I used it to type this story.

The next time I buy a computer, I am going to buy a really cool Mac. I hope they come out with some kind of even cooler iMac by then. Imagine what kind of laptops they will have then. Thanks, Brad, for bringing me back from the dark side.

Michael Craig James Werden is a student in Toronto, Canada. Normally one of these blurbs at the end of a paragraph would say something about, perhaps, his conversion. But that would just be redundant redundant.

Go the the Menagerie of Macs #2 home page.