A very good day to you and greetings from the centre of the known
universe, also known as inner-city London. As property prices around
here are almost as bad as downtown Tokyo before the Japanese economy
went bust, I can afford only a broomsized flat in a paramilitarised
zone from my rather generous income.
For a third of the rent I am paying at the moment, I was able to
live in a magnificent house on the Scottish westcoast, with enough
space to accommodate my five low-end Macs: a beautiful SE I used as my word processor,
sitting on the kitchen table and overlooking the bay; a IIci that was running NetBSD to improve my
Linux skills; a IIfx with a
Radius Rocket that was being
used as a file dump; a IIcx
that was used as a mail server; and a Power Mac 7100 that was set
up as a part time Web server. Of course, most of what I did was a
complete waste of time and just designed to fill in these empty hours
during the Scottish winter, but nevertheless I miss them: I had to sell
them all (well, give them away for a couple of pence, really) because
they didn't fit in my new bloody apartment.
Now I've got this fancy new iBook, which runs on its own
without any hiccups (well, apart from the gripes I've already
published, but that's really just details) and fits into the broom
cupboard. Now I don't have anything anymore to get my hands dirty on.
There is obviously only one alternative to a gaggle of old Macintoshes
that are broken, out of date, hard to get working again, with only the
Net and a bunch of dedicated nutters to help you: OS X.
As it is sitting on my hard disk and cluttering my normally spotless
desktop, I decided to fire it up and take it through the motions. I
looked at it a couple of minutes, saw it crawling over the desktop,
checked out the shell features, and finally remembered what it reminded
me off: the Commodore Amiga. Okay, maybe the desktop wasn't as pretty,
but the principle is the same: a pretty GUI with all the advanced
features you need hidden away under the hood in form of a Unix-like
shell. Interesting though, he?
It just proves that even IT follows the same principles as the
fashion industry: If you just wait long enough the stuff you were
wearing twenty years ago will be back in fashion (in my case a really
horrible Benetton T-shirt that used be all the rage on French beaches
in the middle of the eighties). So, OS X it is: The new hobby that
is supposed to keep me occupied through those wet London evenings that
I should rather be spending on the files of my patients (or with my
long suffering girlfriend). But, as usual, I need your help: Tell me
(and the world) what you have been doing to OS X to turn it into a
operating system that will look and feel as highly personalized and
individual as the current version of OS 9.1 that's still dominating my
world.
So, without hesitation, get writing and enlighten me and the rest of
the world what to do with that strange new thing on our desktops:
OS X.
Signing out from the centre of the universe,
