Hello, my name is Jesse Dyer, and I am a tech nerd. (this is where all the other nerds say "Hello Jesse.")
There's more to me than that; I have a great wife, nearly three children, and some other interests, but if you ask anyone who knows me, being a nerd is a really big part of who I am.
The first computer I ever owned* was a Vic 20, which was the father of the Commodore 64, and son of the PET. For those of you who aren't aware that computers once operated without mice, this marvel of technology was welped in 1980, and to be honest, I can't think of a single modern machine that is as slow. Maybe a toaster. A very simple toaster.
(*This is not the first computer I ever used. That would be my Uncle Bob's Timex Sinclair.)
I graduated to an IBM XT. This machine was steel, sounded like a Tomcat warming for a carrier takeoff, and ate my time for the next four years. I skipped the 286 and 386 while still using this machine, upgrading the video card, replacing hard drives, and generally hating it for being so slow. Funny though, some of my fondest nerd memories are of this cranky old machine. Funny story: the thing nearly killed me when I moved out of my mom's house after it fell on me from the top of a closet. OK, it's only sort of funny.
The driving force behind keeping me at the terminal was a universal one; games. Oh, how I loved the games. My favorite were the old Sierra On-Line adventure games, and Space Quest tops the list. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of techs you meet who're my age killed their fair share of hours finding out how text parsers responded when you swore at them, or clicking every pixel on the screen (about 76,800 back then) in frustration..
I've been using Intel machines ever since. Sure, I used a couple of Cyrix CPUs way back when, and of course in elementary school I played with Apple IIe's, and high school, I worked on the year book with a then brand new Macintosh (no one was calling them Mac's yet, at least not in the main stream) System 7 machine. But it's always been intel platforms for me.
It was a lot of DOS for many years, then Windows 2.1 (yes, there was one), then Windows 3.11. I flirted with PC Geos and QEMM, but I was pretty much in thrall to Uncle Bill for a long long time. Even OS/2 Warp couldn't shake me off, but in all fairness, that's probably because I didn't have the horsepower to run it as it needed to be run.
Then it happened; a friend introduced me to FreeBSD. It was a revelation.. Free Software! It all worked, and you could simply ask the system for it, and it would install it for you! If you wanted to change something, they actually encouraged you to do so! And to share your changes! The prompt meant something again, and I was free! And I didn't have to pirate software anymore! (Seriously folks, how the heck do you think some poor kid from the sticks could afford to try out all those operating systems?)
I became something of an Ubuntu fanboy for a while. Linux rocks, and you can't beat it for cheap computing. Linux is a great platform for development, for ideas, and for accomplishing things that Windows just won't do no matter how hard you bend it.
These days I use a Mac. Using Mac OS has been an eye opener. So many features and tools in Windows and Linux very obviously came from Mac, and when you use one, you see how close-but-not-quite those imitations come. It's a good experience, and the learning curve is incredibly low.
I don't evangelize, since I outgrew OS snobbery a long time ago. Actually, I am an ecumenical geek; computing is best when you use a lot of different systems together. These days I use a Mac, a Windows PC, and a Linux box at the same time for a large part of my day, and I'm very happy that way. Using the three is to approach Nerdvana. Perhaps when I get some alternative OS's under my belt, I'll transcend computing. Either that or I'll get completely brain locked trying to recall what hotkeys work under which OS and totally impair myself. As Raul Julia said in Addams Family, "Either way, what bliss."
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