Mac Attack

With the announcement back in 1996 that Apple would be using NeXTSTEP as their next-generation operating system, I made an announcement to anyone who would listen that I was poised to buy an Apple Mac.

I've pretty much stopped being an early adapter, so my plan was to wait for the second-generation release. Nonetheless, I proclaimed I would buy a Macintosh.

I'm not in the business of making predictions (although I'm more often right than wrong, so maybe I should be) but I made the prediction that NeXTSTEP on the Mac would run circles around Windows NT for performance, functionality, reliability and security.

My decision to buy a Mac was based on the above and

• the relative certainty that Adobe products would be ported to run on the "new" Mac.
• the potential of allowing me to install and use a lot of Internet-standard network administration tools.
• the absolute certainty that it would be at least as slick looking as the NeXSTEP.

As a long-time FreeBSD advocate, the second item is important to me. Under the Hood of Mac OS X lives the NextSTEP-Apple port of FreeBSD. The BSD version of Unix is the base on which most of the internet tools and standards cut their teeth on. Today, Linux is more popular for networking services but most of the inter-networking tools were ported from BSD.

One of the funny things about Apple users is their near-religious fanatisism and evangelism. This is not meant to be disparaging. It just that most of my Mac-using friends have seen me as an infidel of sorts. They gloated when I told them I would buy a Mac. I can still hear the ringing of them saying "I knew you would eventually see the light!"

Actually, I was one of the first six people in Toronto to have the original Apple Macintosh on my desk, predating any of my friends' first use of the Mac. Back then I primarily worked in a CP/M networking environment so I actually hated the first Mac. There was no networking and the "mouse" (a very unintuitive input device!) got in the way of doing "serious work".

That said, I have always been impressed with the Macintosh. Not in love with it; not ever wanting to buy one. But nonetheless, impressed by it. So what was so important about this marriage of NeXTSTEP to the Mac (other than the business and cultural implications of Jobs returning to the Apple helm)?

So now that the dust has more or less settled it's interesting to look back at my predictions and see how far off the mark I was.

One thing is for certain; as I sit here typing this on my new Apple iBook G4, I'm feeling pretty good about my decision to buy it.

Although I have always been impressed with the Mac I have, at the same time, been frustrated. (For comparison, I've always been frustrated by Microsoft but never, never impressed.)

I recall that that first Mac on my desk had exactly three programs: MacWrite, MacPaint and Multiplan (a Microsoft "spreadsheet" program that later became known as "Excel").

Multiplan was slow, crashed every few minutes, and didn't offer any advantage over Supercalc, which I was using daily on our LAN terminals. MacWrite was of no use to me whatsoever. Wordstar was the standard of that day.

MacPaint, on the other hand, offered something new. Primitive as it was, it enabled me to create product price lists that incorporated graphics (the significance of which I will right about in another article).

Back to the present.

While I haven't had much chance to explore the internals, one of the first things I did was open up a terminal window, which announced itself with "Welcome to Darwin!". Darwin is what Apple calls their implementation of BSD.

Now I work in the Unix environment (Linux and FreeBSD) for network servers and Windows 2000/XP for graphic design and programming. While I can do most of my networking with a few add-on tools under Windows, OS X is just more seamless, thanks to it's Unix underpinnings. Everything I need is already here without hunting around and installing extra tools. Cool!

I really like the OS X desktop too, but I have to say that there are some cultural differences that are going to be hard to get used to. OS X offers pretty much the same features as Windows but just does them differently.

One thing I won't miss is the Windows security problems. How do I know that OS X will be any better? Without getting into the technical arguments, let's just say that it will at least be on a par with other Unix-family OSes such as FreeBSD and Linux.

Alas, I am still stuck with using Windows for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. But that only because I'm not ready to fork out the money for the OS X version.

Regarding my predictions:

1) I didn't end up buying version 2, like I said I would. I waited until version 3 (Which Apple calls version 10.3, coded named "panther").

Waiting for 10.3 had more to do with not upgrading existing hardware till there was a need. The final decision rode on the poor health of my IBM Thinkpad. The keyboard died (coffee spills can do that) forcing me to use a USB keyboard, and the display isn't far off from dimming itself into oblivion.

2) For my prediction that OS X would be running circles around Windows, well, Microsoft has done a lot of catching up. Windows XP is faster and more stable than Windows 95.

Regardless, Microsoft can't afford to rest on it's laurels while an industrial strength OS like the Mac OS X nibbling at it's market share. (Advice to Microsoft: shift your focus from fighting Apple and Linux to improving your reliability and security!)

I'm not naive enough to think that Apple will take a serious bite out of Microsoft's market share. But as a technologist, I think we are living in interesting times. OS X has both geek appeal (with it Unix underpinnings and development tools) and sex appeal (with its slick desktop environment).

For the time being I will have to keep at least one Windows XP box running but I can see a not-too-distant future where Microsoft products will be completely out of my life.