Kaiscapes Media - Computers

Looking Backwards and Connecting the Dots

We are neither Macs nor PC’s in my house, though the majority of our computers over the years have been PC’s, for cost, efficiency or job reasons. Despite that, Steve Jobs and Apple Computer has had a profound influence in our lives.

I got an Apple IIe for my college graduation in 1983 and it rocked my world. I had worked part time at the college computing center, an IBM mainframe environment, so owning any machine that didn’t require a whole room full of equipment was simply amazing. During the next few years, it saw some upgrades—a hard drive, (a new thing in those days… floppies were the standard) a color monitor (really a glorified color TV) and a few other things. It taught me a lot. My wife used it to plan our wedding in 1991.

Not long after, she got Mac PowerBook, which she loved, and was heartbroken when she cracked the screen and found out it would cost more to get it fixed than getting a new Mac. She considered it, but started working at a company who standardized on IBM Thinkpads, so that was that. She still has it, broken screen and all. Just can’t bring herself to throw it away. Still boots too.

At the time, I was a system administrator on Sun Microsystems workstations, so my head was in Unix. The Mac-vs-PC wars were in full swing, but I paid little attention, coming from a mainframe, then a Unix world. They were “toy computers” to me. Being a hardware and systems geek, the creative possibilities of a Mac were lost on me. I was also having fun playing with Linux, and building PC’s was a great distraction, so they became the mainstay in our house.

Apple still kept creeping into our lives though. Our ancient 3rd generation iPod is still the main source of music in the house today, permanently seated in its charger because the battery doesn’t stay charged for more than two or three minutes, and it keeps burning out new batteries. It still works, and we’ve found no reason to replace it.

We were slow to adopt the iPhone, and got the 3GS on the verge of the 4 coming out, so we haven’t been eligible for an upgrade from AT&T until recently. We’ll most likely get the 4S when it comes out. Being a professional photographer, having a nice 8 megapixel camera in my phone is too big a temptation to resist.

I got an iPad not long after it came out, then I got my wife one, then upgraded mine to the iPad 2 and gifted my iPad to my goddaughter. I bought one for my nephew as a high school graduation gift during the summer, thinking about how I would have loved one when I started college.

A few months ago, a friend showed me his MacBook Air, and I fell in love. After years of lugging laptops around through cubicles, airports, conference rooms and the like, holding this wafer thin machine in my hands that wasn’t weighted down by a hard drive was irresistible. I had to have one. And since getting one, I find myself reaching for it more often than anything else in the house when I need a real computer, and catch myself wondering why the Lion hand gestures don’t work when I’m on a PC laptop.

“Are you a Mac or a PC?” A common question these days. I’ve always said, “neither” or “both.” I’ve also been quoted as saying, “I buy computers, not religions.” I’m a computer guy from way back. To me, they’re just machines, and there are logistical and economic decisions about buying something like a computer that go beyond a user interface or emotion. Besides, I spend most of my time in a browser and in the cloud, so there isn’t much in the way of onboard software that I care about.

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” I never would have seen the dots being connected when I first booted up my Apple IIe almost 30 years ago, but looking back at the dots, I realized that Apple products have been an agent of change at pivotal points in my life, from teaching me that computers could be small, to planning my wedding, to shrinking my entire CD collection to the size of a small box in my hand, to realizing my lifelong dream of owning a Star Trek communicator, to providing me with a tablet that has become an indispensable walkaround device.

I’m still neither a PC nor a Mac. They’re still just computers to me. And I think Apple may have given us a window into a future world where computing will evolve beyond that old argument. But the loss of Steve Jobs has made me realize the Apples in my life have been more than just computers. I’ve loved them all, and still do.

Thank you, Steve. For everything.

What’s Your Computing History?

The IBM 4331 processor (the long box the size of a small kitchen counter) had 512K of memory. The twin IBM 3310 disk units in the corner each had about 64M of storage. The IBM 3277 terminals displayed green text on a black screen.

I was at a tweetup at the Village Cafe and Sweet Shoppe last night and a few of us geeks started talking about the computers that introduced us to the careers we would eventually have. It was a fascinating conversation, and nostalgic in a way. Some of us had similar backgrounds and some very different, and some of us discovered we lived within striking distance of each other in the Silicon Valley and didn’t even know it. (Not unusual for the Valley.) We were all kindred spirits.

I thought it might be fun to start a conversation where we offer up the computing machines that shaped our careers and lives. I’ll start with mine.

Early in my freshman year at Pomona College in 1979, I was bored one night (meaning I really didn’t want to study) and started exploring Oldenborg, the dorm I lived in that year. I came across a room that wasn’t usually open, that had two mainframe terminals in it, one connected to an IBM 4331 and the other to a DEC 10. My discovering that room on that night was a defining moment in my life, and probably determined the course the led me to where I am today.

I spent my college and early career years in and out of machine rooms like this one. (Photo: Bob Resnikoff)

Every spare moment I had (and some that weren’t so spare) I was in the machine room in the math building. I even got a part time job there so I’d have access 24/7. What really hooked me was when I discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure game. I played that game for hours on end, and eventually got curious about how it was created, which led to my learning Fortran and IBM Assembly Language. That knowledge led to my first real job after graduation, at Syncsort in New Jersey, in 1983, where I worked with updated models of the same mainframes.

Apple IIe with a color display.

Around graduation time, an Apple IIe came into my possession. Around that same period, my dad got a Commodore 64. Being a mainframe geek at the time, these “toy” computers were enchanting. They taught me BASIC and introduced me to graphical games. I remember spending many of my weekends in New Jersey tinkering with my Apple machine—installing a hard drive (my first ever that was smaller than a washing machine), giving it more memory, a color display, etc. I balanced my checkbook using an early version of Quicken on that machine, and it helped plan my wedding several years later, after moving with me to the Bay Area.

Commodore 64

The Mac vs. PC wars were in full swing by the time I took a job with Amdahl in Sunnyvale, California in 1989, but I largely ignored them because I was in the throes of acquiring Unix by way of SPARCstations from Sun Microsystems. Amdahl was a mainframe company, IBM’s largest competitor back in the day, but the engineers needed a way to run several mainframe systems from separate windows, thus the Sun gear, with X-Windows.

By this time, getting into the guts of machines, pulling boards, replacing hard drives and such was second nature to me and all in a days work, so building my first PC was a natural progression. Not that I had anything against Macs, but at that stage in my geek development, I didn’t care much about “easy to use.” I was more fascinated with “fun to build.”

Sun SPARCstation IPC

During my Netscape years, I had to be ambidextrous. The browser behaved differently on Unix vs. Windows vs. Mac OS, and I had to switch among those without thinking, so it didn’t really matter to me what I was using, though I stuck with the PC line for personal use because I’d become fascinated with Linux several years before, when it was still being distributed on floppies.

Now, in my present day life, the majority of my computing happens in a browser, or some Web based application, and my iPhone and iPad have become almost as important to me as my laptop or desktop. I still need a conventional computer, but aside from applications like Photoshop or Lightroom, or the ability to have several large displays, I do most of my computing in the cloud, so I see myself moving away from those more and more in the near future.

So… your turn. What’s your computing history?