Windows

Image: Ah, college.

(No, not that Mac and Me.)

Before I was a Mac user, I was into MS-DOS. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 with a 286 CPU and less than 1MB of RAM. It didn’t even have a hard drive.

During most of the 90s, my family couldn’t afford another computer, so I had to make do with the Tandy 1000 as best I could. I wrote a novella — my first! — on it, as well as countless school papers. We had a dot-matrix printer, so printing five pages took five minutes at least, more if there were graphics. (And woe unto you if your ribbon started running dry!)

Our finances improved around the same time that the iMac — the original gumdrop shaped model — was released, and I just had to have one. My parents splurged on it, with the condition that it was a “family” computer, and I couldn’t use it all the time. (That didn’t last long, as no one else knew how to use it very well.)

Going from DOS to Mac OS 8 was like trading in a Ford Model T for a 90s-era Volvo. Things were markedly better to use than before, but when you rode in your friends’ cars, you’d be struck by how differently their dashboards were laid out, or how the steering column didn’t have the same buttons yours did. Sure, you had a modern car, but it wasn’t like the ones everyone else drove.

And God, I loved that machine.

The love affair would last 17 years, up until a trial separation led me to wonder how much I still loved the Mac.