mrz’s noise

With prodding from co-workers I’ve shed the final vestiges of my Windows life. A couple months ago I switched my portable computing platform to a black MacBook that no one wanted (it seemed the perfect size to take with my on my trip to Amsterdam) and now I’ve replaced my desktop with a Mac Pro.

I don’t know if I’d ever call myself a Windows users - by and large it was what was available and what had games applications.

I first started out on a VIC20 (admittedly, this was a Christmas gift for Dad but it wound its way into my room where I spent countless hours typing in BASIC programs from Compute’s Gazette), moved to a Commodore 64 and finally graduated to an Amiga (which was like Windows but with a usable command shell).

Commodore wasn’t long for the world and I eventually sold it to live in a DOS modem dialer so I can dial up to the ISP I worked at (where my “desktop” was a Sparc 2). This was a time where the most exciting graphical app on the Internet was gopher. Yes, it was a couple years ago.

Windows never interested me until I got involved in the Windows 95 beta and that’s when I bought my first PC (a 90Mhz Pentium; yes, that too was awhile ago). I’ve been pretty Windows centric since but always missed a usable shell. I’ve never been into running Linux (or some variant with X) mostly because of the lack of applications for what I needed to do. The fact of the matter is that the world runs on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is not the same as Office and there does not exist anything like Visio (is there?) on anything other than Windows.

But my reality has recently changed.

1. OS9 sucked, OSX doesn’t
2. I have two kids, playing games seems like a quaint pastime
3. The Network really is the Computer
4. The Web is the platform
5. Parallels is awesome

Sun had it right a couple years ago when they proclaimed “The Network is the Computer (and even here). I spend the majority of my computing time either in a web browser (Firefox, of course), my email (Thunderbird) or logged in through ssh to a remote computer. My data, or that that needs to be available on all machines, lives in a private svn repository. I use Google Apps. None of these are platform specific anymore.

I’ve moved into a world where platform independence, and by extension, an open and free web is increasingly more important. Those sites that require me to use IE or some Active X control are increasingly going fall out of my browser history.

ps. I’m replacing my home computer too.