You must be the change you want to see in the world. - Gandhi
2006, December 02
More Macs in my Life
After the Classic, there have been more Macs in my life.
After I outgrew the Mac Classic in 1994, I upgraded to a refurbished LCIII, with a color monitor. This was a big step; I remembered a woman doing a MacDraw tutorial had said, you should always get a color monitor because it is so much easier on the eyes. I thought, Oh, no, I'm not a computer person, so I don't need to spend that kind of money. Well, here I was 3 and a half years later, a computer person. And she was right. On the LCIII I learned html and put up my first web page, the first version of jsbchorales.net, on March 31, 1996. I did not have storage for the ftp files so they were stored on a server at a college in Texas, thanks to Henry Howey. I covered a lot of territory on that little computer. My daughter used it while studying for her Masters degree, then it was given away.
Eventually I outgrew the LCIII after I had upgraded the RAMM, put in a new hard drive (750MB - so huge) and installed a floating point processor. This computer was connected by an AppleTalk network to a printer and another computer. I had phone lines running all over the place, mostly held in place over the doors with masking tape. Not so aesthetic, but effective.
In April 1997. I moved to a Very Large Computer, the PowerMac 9600, with a 4GB hard drive and 128MB of RAMM. This seemed so large I couldn't imagine that I would ever need another computer. I could run FrameMaker and any other program I wanted. I seemed to have arrived at the top of the world; I didn't yet appreciate how fast change happened in the computer world.
And of course, a new operating system was around the corner, OS X in March, 2001. So while I continued running my main programs on the 9600, in December 2001 I got a Mac iBook to start learning OS X and more about ethernet networking, web serving and databases.
Then in 2003 the new G5 PowerMac was introduced. I fell in love all over again and had to have one. So I gave away the 9600 which for all practical purposes I had stopped using and bought the G5.
Open, the G5 is as beautiful as the outside. It is easy to upgrade and easy to clean.
Three years ago this was the ultimate machine, with a 250GB hard drive and a GB of RAMM, and two 2Ghz processors. I expect to use it in some capacity the rest of my life. Here I make web pages, mess with MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Gallery, and work with music files.
