Priorities

The Mac is 30. But, alas, other things impinged upon me recently.

First off, my enthusiasm towards computers is at somewhat of a low point. The past couple of weeks I experienced blurred vision and sore eyes, initially attributed to too much late night reading, but lately diagnosed as a local allergic reaction to something in my environment¹.

A few eyedrops (and a few days sitting in a couple of different places at the office) soon set me right, but I eventually came down with a nasty flu (courtesy of my kids) and had an even nastier reaction to the antibiotics, so this last week was mostly spent reading and waiting things out².

Still, for future reference, here’s the list of Macintosh models I used, in rough chronological order:

• Plus
• SE/30
• Mac II (e IIfx)
• Portable
• LC II
• PowerBook
• Quadra 950
• PowerMac 8100
• Classic (build a working one out of two that were scrapped)
• PowerBook G3
• iMac (Bondi)
• PowerMac G3
• iBook (clamshell)
• iBook G3 (the first one I bought for myself, which is still around)
• iMac
• G4 Cube (had one on load for half a year or so)
• iMac G5
• MacBook (black)
• Mini (several generations)
• MacBook (unibody)
• MacBook Pro (also several generations)

It all started soon before going into college, and now that I look at it, it’s a pretty long list. And these are the ones I sat before and used to do stuff like learning to code, create various sorts of projects in MacroMedia Director (remember that? here’s a nice retrospective on it) and, ultimately, doing everything I ever needed to do on a computer.

I’ve been wishing the next one to be an Air for a couple of years now, but the iPad has been working out well for me and, of course, computing has changed tremendously – I no longer need to have all the computing power I require sitting on my lap or on my desk, but am content in reaching out to use it via the network.