Getting Back to Mac – How it all began

My first Mac was an original Macintosh 128, purchased in 1984 in a vain attempt to equip myself with tools for law school. It served me long and well. Somewhere along the way I found that funky screwdriver thing it took to crack the case open and crammed in another 128K. Man oh man. Then I hit the big time — moved up to a MacPlus and bought my first external harddrive. The drive came in at a whooping 30 MB. Life was good. But, the Mac charms didn’t stick. The price tag for portability in the Mac world was just too high and eventually I bailed out on Apple and moved in to the PC world. Got the smallest notebook I could find (this was at the beginning of my wandering the world years), learned DOS and turned my back on Mac. Years later, when I started my first web design company my designer insisted on a PowerMac. He got it. When the DotCom bubble burst and I had to sell everything in sight, I kept the Power Mac — for about 3 months. I just couldn’t make the transition back. I took the cash, assembled a white box PC and was a happy camper. It took my wife to bring me back to Mac. Together we run water&stone — a web dev company. She needed a Mac to do cross platform compatibility testing. I said, “Oh those new MacBook Pros look really sweet. Why don’t we get one of those, honey?” To my surprise, it worked and next thing you know, I’m sporting a 15″ Intel-based MBP. Also to my surprise: I loved it. The MBP became my home machine. At the office I was still locked into a WinXP world. I lived off a portable drive and lots of portable apps to keep my life in synch. Then, just about two months ago, I made the decision to leave that job and work with water&stone full time. My first assignment landed me in an extended consultancy with an NGO. It meant I would be on the road again and it meant I got to call the shots about my hardware environment. I made the decision to go Mac all the way. As I stared investigating applications and configurations, a number of my friends asked me to write up what I found. I’m now in a position to do it — have a bit of free time in the evenings and weekends, so over the next few days (weeks?) I will take you through what I have found. My prodigal trip as I journey back to Mac. >> Read part 2, Moving the Mail.

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