The New Road

Excited about the New Mac

I'm very excited about the new Mac. I read a short Wired article on the twenty most influential Macs, of which I had experience with twelve. The five most important were:

• Mac Plus where I learned event oriented programming using Think Pascal. It had a 20MB hard drive!
• Mac IIcx where I wrote QTest for Mark O'Connell. I took a vacation for a couple of days to write the program as a Christmas gift.
• Mac IIfx where I wrote Pulse Control for Bookman. This was a work-horse machine with an amazing 80MB hard drive that ran like a bat out of hell.
• PowerBook 170 where I wrote FretNavigator during the first year of my marriage to Lori. Psst, this was actually a work machine (I never owned my own machine until the G4 PowerBook Mac). I wonder if UM cares that they own the rights to FretNavigator. Methinks not.
• PowerBook G4 Pismo that I used for Code Generation in Action which I will now be replacing. It's an outstanding machine, but the hinges broke, the drive is dead, the display is scratched and the keyboard is stuffed. Plus it is badly in need of an OS clean sweep to make up for three years of my abuse. It would take $700 to fix just the case and for another ~$500 we could get Lori a new machine that is twice as fast, has twice the drive and twice the RAM of the G4 and has no flaws.

The replacement is a very high end 17" PowerBook that will have a gig of RAM. Which is incredible. I couldn't have even imagined this powerful a machine when I was working at the University of Miami only eight years ago. Crazy. If I had thought of it I would have been thinking server. Not a five pound notebook that I would be taking on a plane and watching computer generated movies on. My how times have changed.