the switch (back)

I finally made the switch today, or at least put my money where my mouth is. I'm retiring my battered and broken PC laptop in favor of an Apple laptop. Feels like I've come full circle as my first computer was an Apple computer. My dad spent around $3,000 at Micro Center (the original one in Columbus, Ohio) way back in 1986 for our Apple IIc, and that's not adjusting for inflation either! (I ran the inflation calculator and $3,000 in 1986 is equivalent to $5,139 in 2005 -- geez, next time I see my dad I'll be sure to thank him for making that kind of investment in me -- that kind of money doesn't come easy.) If I remember correctly, the Apple IIc (1 MHz, 128 KB of RAM) was about $1,300, the Apple RGB Color Monitor (80 columns by 24 rows) was about $500, the Apple Mouse II (one button) was $100(!), and my trusty Apple ImageWriter II color dot matrix printer ran about $600. I think the rest of the cost was rounded out by the warranty (which we probably shouldn't have bought because nothing ever broke) and early-era edutainment software (like Math Blaster and Word Attack) and some software to print stuff with. We bought a copy of The Print Shop and printed junk out until the printer ribbon ran dry. Those were the days, when you had to perforate the holes off the sides of the printer paper before stapling and turning your assignment in. Almost twenty years after we bought this computer, it's still working, with all of the software we bought for it, including one of my favorite pieces of software ever, AppleWorks version 3, my first word processor and spreadsheet program. I tried to convince my dad to get Bank Street Writer (anyone remember that one from elementary school?!) but we got AppleWorks instead to be one step ahead of the school.

I don't think I've been happy with my word processor since then. When my uncle converted me to PC, I started out on Word Perfect 5.1, which was insanely annoying compared to AppleWorks. Then Windows 3.1 came around and instead of exiting Windows to start Word Perfect, I'd click on Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 to do my editing. I've been stuck with Word until recently when I've just been using a plain old text editor to do most of my composition. When I'm finished with the actual brainwork of writing, I dump it into Word and do my formatting, or mark it up in HTML, or if I feel like a geek I'll mark it up in LaTeX (a typesetting program) and generate a PDF file out of it.

So, just for kicks, here's the Apple IIc, inside designed by Steve Wozniak and his team, outside designed by Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who also designed the first black-box TV for Sony (almost all TVs are black boxes now), designed the brand strategy for Lufthansa Airlines, designed the user interface for SAP.. this guy is good.



Can't forget my workhorse printer, the Apple ImageWriter II.


I'm hoping my next Apple computer will be just as fun as my first one.