Ah, the age-old (or at least computer age) battle between Mac & PC. I'm sure there are millions of articles out there about this same subject, but let me enlighten you from my perspective a bit.
The 80's:
The 80's introduced me to the concept of a computer. This concept was stamped with an apple-shaped logo found all across my elementary school computer lab. The apple was all there was, it was the computer, what else was there? I remember the day the school got it's first Mac, us kids were paraded past it in the lab. I remember so vividly the bezier curve screen saver that invoked the ideas of mass-computing power that lay behind those mystical morphing lines on the screen. I felt myself wanting to know more, yet totally overwhelmed by the mind-blowing capabilities this computer must have.
The 90's:
My history with the computer in the 90's started out slow. I had been given an Apple IIC by a local charity group wanting to get rid of some old Apples. I used it to mess around with a few games, compose some documents, print banners and eventually figured out how to hack my way out to a BASIC prompt and start really messing around. During the early 90's, it didn't really click with me yet, this computer still couldn't show me the real potential of computers. Any other computers at school were so locked down you could only search for books or type stuff - how boring! What use do computers have if this is all they can do?
Then, in the latter-half of my high school career, I was thrown into a virtual cauldron of computer geekdom - my friend's basement. His dad worked for a company selling PC's and had a whole basement full of PCs and parts galore. On top of that, they actually used their computers to do cool things, like surf this new "world wide web" thing, play games, and write code! I was dazzled by all this and eventually was pushed to sell my ATV and buy a PC! What a change! I soon found out that I had a real knack for this stuff. I remember when I unboxed my first PC, I read every manual (including the one with all the DOS commands in it) from cover to cover, memorizing almost everything. Within about a year, I was 1 of 2 king computer geeks at school, writing code, hacking up a storm. I left high school and went on to college. I wanted to do a computer science degree, but knew I wasn't too academic, so tech college it was! I didn't even graduate that, but I did find a great job pretty quickly with a small software company who saw my potential.
OK, put on the brakes here, this is getting to be too autobiographical. By this time, the PC was becoming very ingrained in me, every syntax, click, and concept was PC-centric. I thought of the Mac as kind of a kids computer, not really for real business, and certainly not for the uber geek who wanted to get his hands dirty by messing around with hardware, code and even Linux.
As the years progressed as a IT guy using only PCs, my vision of Macs didn't change much. My vision of Macs was kind of weird. I thought of them as the "dark side" but yet in my mind, they were very white, clean cut and didn't really fit the description the words "dark side" depict. Maybe someday I would investigate this other side some, but only secretly so nobody knew about it...
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