Loaded
Today was like a bizarre mixture of Christmas and the Twilight Zone for me and, as I can imagine, for a lot of other Mac users. March 24th was the day that Mac OS X, the legendary new UNIX operating system, officially showed up at my doorstep. This was also the day that the future of a minority computer company was quietly launched. Only the future will tell of today’s real significance to the world at large. For me, though, it was like anticipating the birth of a child.
And, yes, I did have my moments.
- 10:00 am : My wife, Liz, answers the doorbell in her pajamas. A delivery man drops off Apple’s future, waves goodbye, and continues his long day of deliveries.
- 10:05 am : I open the box, glance over the
Welcome to Mac OS X booklet, and pull out the multiple CD’s. I find one that reads Mac OS X Developer Tools. I explain to Liz that Mac OS X is the only major OS to ship with
Java 2. She gives a look of not caring less and I start to think about what a tremendous geek I’ve become in the past 5 years. - 10.15 am : In the middle of playing
Dues Ex I ask Liz if she’d mind me loading a completely new OS on our home computer. She becomes concerned with not being able to play her game afterwards. There’s nothing I can guarantee her so I start thinking about the alternative. - 11:00 am : I find documentation that says Mac OS X does not support external firewire drives. I was hoping that the final release would, unlike the Public Beta. There goes the alternative.
- 1:00 pm : I finish up a complete backup of my files. I hit the
Mac sites to see what people are saying about the new OS. There are a lot of complaints. Some people are calling it
slow. I take the complaints with a grain of salt but… - 1:30 pm : I sit on it.
- 4:00 pm : Liz goes to the store. I pop in the Mac OS X installer CD and go through the steps right up to actual install. I lose my nerve and eject.
- 7:00 pm : Realizing that I may want the entire Sunday to either play with the new OS or return things back to normal I load the CD, go through the 12 minute installer program, enter all my personal settings, and experience
Mac OS X for myself. It is, in parts, amazing but very new to me. It doesn’t appear to be slow, as some were saying, or at least as slow as I imagined it to be. I sit back, relax, and start playing with Aqua, the Dock, and establish an Internet connection. This is great! - 7.30 : I am officially loaded.
- 10:00 pm : I set my start up disk to reboot from Mac OS 9 system folder. Everything is as it was before I loaded Mac OS X. All I have to do to go back to either one is point my start up disk to the right system and reboot. I sit back again and relax. I start to compose the news for my webpage. All is well and I start thinking about investing in Apple.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
