amper's Journal: The Return of the Mac

Paul Graham's recent article, "The Return of the Mac", as covered here on Slashdot caused me to ruminate a bit on my own travels in the world of technology. I've been playing with computers ever since the first TRS-80's hit my local Radio Shack back in the 1970's. It was a common occurance for me to ditch my mother during trips to the local shopping mall and head straight to the Shack so I could check out silly bits of primitive software on a 4K TRS-80 Model I.

Of course, my real entry into the world of computing didn't come until 1986, when I matriculated at the esteemed Carnegie-Mellon University, despite my ownership, beginning in 1982, of an Atari 800 with 10K of ROM and 48K of RAM.

What made my experience at CMU interesting was the combination of Macintosh SE computers and the Andrew System, which was in development at the time on a mixture of systems, including the IBM PC RT, which would eventually morph its way into the RS/6000 series of workstation-class machines. Although my budding design skills were nutured by the Macintosh environment, my early exposure to the UNIX-based OS of the Andrew System and the Internet access that came with it left me hungering for much more than the simple Mac could provide at the time.

Over the years, while most of my artistic brethren found themselves captivated by the possibilites of Mac-based Desktop Publishing in the midst of the impending Internet explosion of the mid-90's, I began to immerse myself more and more in the inner workings of the Internet, starting with a simple shell account on a SunOS box at one of the first ISP's that offered accounts to the general public (well, at least those of the general public who gave two beans about the Internet in 1992) accessed via a 1200 baud modem. 9600 baud modems were the thing of the day, but I had gotten my 1200 baud device for free.

This all ended up with my heading up a new ISP that was one of the first to offer exclusively broadband service, through a combination of ISDN and T1 accounts. DSL was an up and coming technology at the time, but it would seem that Bell Atlantic was catching on pretty quickly to the use of "alarm circuits", over which it was at one time possible to provision 768Kbps circuits for the measly price of about $40 a year, plus the cost of two DSL modems.

By the time Steve Jobs completed his return to Apple Computer and installed my old schoolmate Avi Tevanian and his Mach Kernel in the role of Mac OS X, I had been successfully running Linux, MkLinux, Darwin, and OpenBSD on various machines, not to mention running the ISP almost exclusively on Windows NT (no mean feat in the mid-90's, but also helped by the existance of Netscape's server applications). Not that NT was my choice--the ISP was part of a systems integration house, and the suits wanted to prove it could be done. I think the most valuable experience I got out of it was learning to run a multi-hosting LDAP server.

Anyway, it makes me smile to see all these *nix hackers coming over to the Mac side of things, since I spent so much time using Macs as my workhorses, but secretly wishing for the power of UNIX that I had been exposed to at college. Through my association with a graphic arts service bureau that used Canon products heavily, I had also been exposed to NeXTSTEP, which made the Windows 3.11 of the time look extremely primitive, and rightly so. Too bad my Canon rep was never able to swing me a copy of OpenSTEP...not that I could have afforded a 486, though.

The first Mac I ever owned was a IIsi, which I bought for $900 the week after it was discontinued. I really wanted it loaded with A/UX, but that was quite expensive in those days--much more than I could afford on my pathetic salary of the time. 9MB of RAM and a 127MB Quantum LPS HDD went a long way in those days!

I miss the old days of Apple. Someplace around here, I have a copy on a SyQuest cart of a fantastic little Lisp multi-media development environment that never made it out of Apple's Development Labs. That was the thing that got me hooked on Paul Graham's Lisp books. Tonight, I ordered his "Hackers and Painters" from Amazon in tribute to his new essay. I never did pick up a copy of Macintosh Common Lisp (again, the lack of funds rears its ugly head).

I fear I may never fully understand the various uses of car, cdr, or the CLOS, but it could be worse...I could still be stuck on Dylan, right?