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Jul 2, 2009

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…” switching to Mac

Well, maybe not so long ago and well, to be honest not really that far way, but, back in the UK when I started at Cumbria College of Art and Design (now part of the University of Cumbria) in 1989 my first dabblings with computers was with a Macintosh.

I remember that the college had 4 of them to share between c.400 students.  An unthinkable ratio nowadays no doubt.  But back then few people used them (or even knew what they were for I suspect) and I had one of them pretty much all to myself.  As I was studying graphic design at the time, I spent endless hours learning and working with probably some of the earliest versions of Adobe Pagemaker, Freehand and Photoshop.  All in black & white of course and probably on some ridiculously small screen by modern terms.
Unbelievably I still have some of the work that I did on those macs all those years ago 🙂

Sadly however, over the next years I drifted away from both design and computer usage, mainly due to my migrating to Spain and working in many non-computer related jobs.

Somehow even the invention of Internet went unnoticed by me, that was until the end of 1999.   At that time I was living in Madrid running a restaurant that I had helped renovate over the previous months and a friend of mine kept going on about this “internet” thing.

At the start of 2000 I sat down with my shiny new PC (amd with 20GB hard drive!) and decided to learn how to do “html” and then, for some reason I had been persuaded that Flash was the way to go so that was what I concentrated on having got a grasp of basic html.

And that was it.  From 2000 till now that is what I have done, developed web pages here in Spain.

So, back to the point of this post, why did I start out on a PC rather than a Mac back in January 2000?
I would like to say that it was because I didn’t have the budget to be able to buy a Mac, though true, it was not the reason.  The truth is that it didn’t even cross my mind.  Getting a PC just seemed like the “only” option.  Since then I have been suffering the consequences of that decision as I have moved from Windows 98, through XP to eventually Vista ( what was that? ).
Finally, in April of this year I decided that enough was enough.  I won’t go into the problems I was having with my (admittedly cheap) PCs as I am sure that most people have had the same problems.  It was time to make the switch.

I bought myself a shiny (literally) new imac 20″ (24″ wouldn’t fit on my desk 🙁 ).

It took all of 5 minutes (including time to remove the PC and attachments) to get it out of the box, plug-in “the” cable and boot it up.
And since then, it has simply worked!

Suffice to say that I am really satisfied with my decision.  The first few days required a few changes to my working habits as anyone who has made the change knows, but now, 2 months later, I wonder why I ever “did it like that” before!

Moving over to a Mac must be like selling your old Ford Escort and buying a BMW or Mercedes (I don’t actually know as I have never had either) – the old car did the job, but the new one is on a completely different level!

So, that’s it, no looking back now, I’ve made the switch, now I just need to justify it……!

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