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www.apple.com, www.apple.de -- official Apple websites English Mac magazines: German Mac magazines: Software & Downloads: | |||||||||||||||
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As you might already guess I use an Apple Mac and feel pity for anyone who doesn't. ;-)
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After using DOS, Windows and afterwards OS/2, Unix / Linux for more than 17 years I finally arrived at Apple computers. I hated Windows for it's instability and unclearness. Linux is much better in this respect but installing new hardware and software is almost always a pain and the surface has to change considerably before I would call it user-friendly (but I have to admit that it catches up!). In my opinion the Mac combines the advantages of both worlds: the stability and clarity of Unix and a surface which is incredibly comfortable. Everything just works and most of it does exactly the way you would expect it to work. At the moment I use an iMac G4 with a (terrific!) 20 inch TFT screen, 1.25 GHz and 768 MB RAM under Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther'. It's the best personal computer system I've ever had. Once you've used an Apple you'll know why there are no Mac users who switch back to Windows PCs! The first personal computer I ever used was an IBM PC with an Intel 8088 processor and 4.77 MHz, 64 kilobyte RAM and no hard disk, running under PC-DOS two-point-something. The first computer I ever owned was an Amstrad/Schneider PC 1640 with an 8086 processor running at 8 MHz, 640 kilobyte RAM, MS-DOS 3.3, two disk drives, a monochrome screen and also zero hard disks. Like many others I was fascinated by computers, read everything I could find about them, learned how to write assembler programs with the debug utility (there was actually a great book by Peter Norton where he explained how to do this; I could afford this book but couldn't afford to buy a macro assembler). I wrote articles for a German computer magazine named DOS International which of course doesn't exist anymore. That was a time where one had to copy an article to a 5.25 inch floppy disk, put it into one of these cardboard envelopes and send it to the editorial department. No modems, no e-mail. Eventually I had an 80386 PC with 8 MB RAM and a 60 MB hard disk drive, then a pentium (the P60 with the design flaw which screwed up floating point operations as some might remember), a modem, an internet connection, and so on. In the beginning computers used to be fun but with Windows 3.1 and later Windows 95 I got more and more frustrated as it was no longer clear what they were doing and if something didn't work it was not clear why. Nothing was documented anymore. Windows crashed all the time without any clear reason apart from being written by Microsoft. Expensive programs like Microsoft Word (which I bought, by the way!) were full of bugs and not usable for anything apart from writing short letters. If you would try to write a long document like a book or a PhD thesis, sooner or later suddenly something unexplainable would happen to your Word file like e.g. an indention to a paragraph which you couldn't undo. The only way to recover your document was to open a new document from scratch and copy over piece by piece and throw away the old document afterwards. The 'solution' was to split up a long text into many files like e.g. each chapter in a separate file. In my opinion something like this shouldn't happen with a program which costs several hundred dollars. Like many others I felt that I wasted a lot of time with fighting against the mistakes made by other programmers and knowing about computers more and more meant only to know about bugs and how to get around. I hated it. Computers just have to work in the first place, otherwise they aren't a tool for creativity -- which I think they should be. In the mid 1990s Linux became popular. Everything was open source and documented and very very stable but I wouldn't call Linux / Unix user-friendly. I used it for several years (and still use it on my PC at the institute) but never got entirely happy with it although of course it is much less painful than Windows. (I have to admit that I never used a Windows version newer than Windows 98, second edition). I always liked Apple computers but they used to be out of my price range. Macs became an option for me when the first iMac was released in August 1998. I liked everything about this computer apart from the tiny, low quality screen, which was the reason why I didn't buy one. Now I use an iMac G4 with an 20 inch TFT display and couldn't be more happy. Finally, after about 10 years, it's fun again for me to use computers! -- Markus Ehrenfried | |||||||||||||||
iScroll2 enables two finger scrolling on Apple iBooks G4 and older Powerbooks.
Dashboardlineup collects additional widgets for the new Dashboard feature of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. | |||||||||||||||
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