Twenty years?

I just realized I've been using Macs for twenty years. Probably as of some time this month or last month, or maybe February even. The University of Washington had an open computer lab (as they all were in those days) a block and a half from the Last Exit Coffeehouse, where I hung out. Sometime in the Winter or early Spring of 1984, a few "Macintosh" computers — no number, no model designation, it just said "Macintosh" — showed up. I think there were four of them. I schlepped up the Ave to the U Bookstore to buy some of those weird hard-sided little floppy disks, went down to the lab, and started fiddling around with it. I loved what I could do with it, and hated how slow it was. Computers were just a past-time to me then. I would play with a Mac occasionally over the next few years, but no more than with a PC or an Apple II. In 1987 I got a job doing data analysis, using a PC and a spreadsheet. I was on the DOS side of the Mac vs DOS skirmishes in the late eighties — until the first time I saw a Mac II with a 21-inch monochrome display, in 1989. I switched sides right then, and never looked back. In the nineties, unix would claim more of my attention, and I spent a lot of time wishing Macs could be more unix-like, and unix more Mac-like, and had a brief fling with BeOS, hoping it would be the holy grail. Then, finally, Apple itself brought the Mac and unix together. It's a rough fit in a few places, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. Still, I can't help wondering what the Mac I'll be sitting in front of twenty years from now will be like....