Introduction: My history with Macs (or how OS X hooked me)

Macs are hot right now. The hardware is well designed, sexy, and highly coveted. But while many new users are drawn to Macs because of image or status, I think they ultimately buy - and stay - with the platform because of a superior balance of functionality and ease of use. My story may be a bit different: it’s the new Mac operating system, OS X, that hooked me.

My history with the Mac and Mac OS X

Least anyone think me a Mac zealot, I am actually a relatively recent convert to the platform. I’ve been a Windows user from pretty much the beginning of Windows (and a DOS and even CP/M user before that) - so I have a lot of history with PCs. And I have experience with Linux, OS/2, BeOS and even the Commodore 64 BASIC OS.

My first exposure to Macs was not a positive one. Decades ago I helped a graphic artist friend buy his first Mac. He brought me along to the store because I was “a computer guy”. When I was test driving the machine at the store I found it hard to adjust to (coming from DOS/Windows). Back then there were no multi-button mouses, and the classic Mac OS worked much more differently from Windows than the current Mac OS does today - both because of changes in the Mac (like multi-button mouse support), but also changes in Windows that “borrowed” a lot from the Mac interface and experience. This old Mac experience - an experience like I had with the old Mac OS - is what most people (myself included until recently) think of when they hear about Macs. The think of all the differences that existed in the UI, file incompatibilities, etc. These no longer exist - but most people don’t know that. Interestingly, many Mac “old timers” still long for the classic OS and the different way it worked. Not me.

The classic OS always seemed strange to me. Not so much the UI, but basic things like the cryptic finder (the Mac equivalent of the Windows File Explorer) and the “extras” folder (a folder where drivers and system level things were put in order to be loaded at runtime), lack of preemptive multitasking - so that it often just didn’t feel, well, predictable. But even worse was the fact that I was a Windows (and before that DOS) programmer, and things at the system level (the architecture) were just too different on the Mac (both because of different, RISC-based hardware and the way the operating system was designed).

But in the early ‘90s I stumbled across NeXT computers, and dove into their architecture a bit because of the rave reviews it was getting from Object Oriented developers at the time. Its architecture and the developer resources were cutting edge. But the boxes were too expensive for most independent developers to buy, so they were relegated to niche industries were they did quite well for a period. So I watched NeXT with interest during that period, and when they decided to port the NeXT operating system to the PC platform, as a product named NeXTSTEP, I bought a copy in the hope of exploring this wonderful object-oriented, developer-friendly OS. But, as is the case with any OS running on PC hardware, the variety of motherboards and peripherals in different PCs (with their associated drivers, etc.) meant that only a few hardware combinations worked - a problem everything from Linux to Vista has faced on PCs - and so I never got a working system up and running. But the desire for an OS like that persisted.

So, when the NeXT venture finally failed to be profitable, and Steve Jobs was brought back to Apple (along with the NeXT technology), I watched with interest as the company made OS X from the NeXT OS’s bones. When OS X was released I knew it was time for me to take a peek. So I found a under-utilized Mac, loaded OS X 10.1 on it, and gave it a good going over by using it as the primary computer for doing my job for a few months. And it worked so well that I got a Mac for my exclusive machine for work, and them for home, and then replaced my wife’s computer at home, and so on.

And I haven’t looked back since.