Peter’s Brain

The first computer I ever owned, was an Apple IIe. It had this matching screen placed on top of it and ran a version of Basic. With the Z80 card which fitted into ISA-like slots, it was possible to set the screen to 80 columns and run a complete office suite from two 256K floppy-disks.

This office suite had some kind of sketch program that could be used by something homebrewed with two wheels (One for the X-Axis and one for the Y-Axis) which had three buttons for setting, copying and cancelling. It looked like the internals of a mouse if you ever disassembled one. Remember. In those days the mouse didn’t even exist yet.

During those days I still was a student and all the software we used ran on the DOS/PC combi. So eventually the PC entered our house and was used for many years. Luckily a couple of years later there was an exciting new OS on the Internet available, called something like “Laainuks” After giving it a try, the DOS/Windows combi was thrown out of the window. (No pun intended).

A new exciting period started. I picked up C programming and started to develop software for the kernel to get the hardware we used working with Linux. Also user-space programming was picked up since Trolltech ( back then called “Quasar Technologies” ) released their C++ toolkit to the community. (This was also the major drive behind KDE). These days, Qt (or “cute” as some pronounce it ) is available on all major platforms and even on the less known platforms.

For my own company, I needed (or better : “wanted” ) a new notebook. After using my trusty VAIO for almost three years, I wanted something new. Also I noticed that all the major Linux Distributions suffer from less quality as we were used to in the early days. A lot of software crashes out of the box, giving you a feeling of “being shipped too early” or “not really well tested”. So actually I was kind of fed-up with Linux distro’s ( Still Linux is one the best Operating Systems available, in my opinion. Mainly because it is OpenSource). For my own workstation, I’m willing to build my own “Linux from scratch” but my business-laptop should be working “out of the box”.

After some thought I decided to buy the all new MacBook Pro. And what a choice it was. Being almost three times more expensive than a mainstream notebook, I was really impressed when I opened the box. There was this inch-thick, less than 3kg weighting brick of shiny silver. 17″ wide. I felt like a small child in a candy-store who just heard the last words of his mom saying: “Whatever you want, it’s yours”. After a hasty unpack and plugging in, I booted the machine and was surprised to see the look and feel of the Operating System (Leopard or MacOSX 10.5.1, take your pick) Wifi, camera, bluetooth mouse, network printers, NAS and external harddrive. All was recognized immediatedly and ready to use, without the hassle of downloading drivers or hack some config-files. Even my Nokia N95 was recognized, paired and synchronized with iCal and Address Book without any trouble.

Now it was time to setup my programming environment. I downloaded the opensource edition of Qt, installed MySQL, Xcode and compiled Qt. No problems there. Only the fact that I don’t need to set up a “linker cache” like I used to do on Linux was kind of a shocker to me. The Trio from Microsoft (Own directory, Predefined directory and $PATH) had found its way to the Apple. Ah well, it is still a *nix system, so what the hack. It’s something I can live with.

At the moment I have a fully loaded, ready for business notebook that looks good, types fantastic (I’m a bit of a nag when it comes to keyboards) and works like a charm. After a little (!) detour of more than 20 years, I’m back where I started. Back at Apple and planning on staying there.