opinios

Reviving a Book of Power

When I first discovered computers, it was on an Apple.

It must have been about 1985 when my father bought home an Apple II computer with an amber screen, 64K of memory and a single 5 1/4" floppy drive (that's right, no hard drive!) I'm sure some of you remember the one.

It was a pretty ugly box, but I used to do all sorts on that beast. A major high school project involved a program which displayed (with coordinates defined pixel by pixel) Japanese characters from a basic menu. I also programmed the very limited speaker (that normally emitted a high pitched beep) to play Axel F. Again, the frequency and pitch were all individually set using numbers, note after note, in Apple BASIC. And what classic games like Defender, Robotron and Dig Dug lacked in graphics, they made up for ten-fold in playability.

However somewhere along the line I made the switch to a PC. All the guys at school were programming DOS batch files, and there were games coming out like Leisuresuit Larry and Castle Wolfenstein that seemed to indicate that the PC was the 'technology of the moment' and worth investing in. Pirating of software was rife, and - legal issues and ethics of a 15 year-old geek aside - the availability of otherwise expensive programs like MS Office and Photoshop via this network of friends was an economically attractive reason to convince my parents to buy an Intel 286 PC for school and university.

Throughout the 90s computers got faster and grew RAM and hard disk space at an enormous rate in order to accommodate Microsoft Windows and its continually expanding demands. The corporate world embraced PCs, and when I began to pursue a career in software, it made sense to stick with them. I never looked back at those days spent on the Apple, and I haven't thought about it much until now.

In exchange for a recent web site project, I got hold of an Apple Powerbook laptop. It's an older model (1998) with only 128MB RAM and no USB or Firewire support, but it is good enough for what I need - to test how web sites display in the Mac browsers like Safari and IE5.

Mind you, getting it up and running was an ordeal: To run the latest browsers and other software, you need to be running Mac OS X. At first it had OS 9 installed, but it required the hard disk to be repartitioned in order to install OS X, and when this happened the restore disk turned out to be OS 8. Which doesn't let you jump to OS X directly (you need OS 9 as a "bridge"). And even after I had purchased an OS 9 disk from eBay for $50, I then had to use an open source tool called XPostFacto to trick the OS X Panther installer into ignoring the fact that my Powerbook has no USB support.

But I got there in the end, and here's where I get to the point of my post: it rocks!

I can't believe that a machine that is 3 years older, has 1/5 the RAM and is 1/8 the processor speed of my Toshiba 1 GHz Windows XP laptop, can run some things faster than it. It is more stable (the Toshiba shuts down every now and then without warning). The interface is prettier and more intuitive. The display is nicer to look at. Admittedly I don't have any large apps like Photoshop for it, but for running iTunes, Thunderbird, Firefox, Safari etc (all at the same time) the speed seems comparable to the XP machine. Plus it doesn't seem to leak memory when I put it to sleep, so I never have to actually shut it down or reboot it. And it wakes up quicker.

And, get this: when I have the machines both connected to my home network, it plays the shared iTunes music from my PC more smoothly than the Windows laptop that the music files live on!

In short, even though OS X is meant for more recent, more powerful machines, it still runs great on older machines like this one. I can't imagine running Windows XP on an equivalent machine with those specs. If the thing even installed, it would run like a dog.

For those of you who have not seen the light and thought (like I did until recently) that Macs were only for graphic designers and were too Mickey Mouse for those of us who like to get under the hood and tinker - think again. I am thinking very seriously about making the switch for my next computer purchase.

Here's why: about 4 years ago the Mac OS X operating system was rewritten completely, based on open source BSD UNIX. Rather than taking the Microsoft approach of putting band-aid upon band-aid, Apple made a decision to wear the risk of backward compatibility issues by thinking long-term and developing an operating system that really is as robust as UNIX but very easy to use. And if you know what you are doing, you can tinker to your heart's content - a bash command shell, built-in Apache web server and other utilities are all there out of the box.

Not to mention that the interface is beautiful. Really. There are a few things that are a bit different, but basically there's very little in terms of a learning curve as it is all quite intuitive.

And apart from Office and Photoshop, most of the software packages I use the computer for these days (text editor, web browser, FTP client, CMS packages, iTunes, Apache, MySQL email client) are all open source licenced, so they don't cost anything anyway.

Hmm, those G4 iBooks are lookin' very attractive right now...