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Perhaps I'm dating myself, but when I entered college in 1988, the Computer Science department required me to buy a Mac II because it was the only personal computer of the day that ran a type of Unix. No, not Mac OS X silly, but A/UX. I never really used the Mac OS back then -- always did my projects under A/UX. Recently my buddy Ed Burns invited me to a "classic arcade game" exhibit at the Orlando Science center, and there happened to be an exhibit of Apple computers that was the personal collection of someone on display. You guessed it, there was a Mac II on display! Yes, that's right -- the computer I used in college was in a museum. Hey, it had an 80MB hard drive, and all my engineering friends only had 20MB drives in their IBM PCs running MS-DOS.

After I graduated, I sold my Mac II to another student. My first job had me using Windows 3.1, and I've been using Microsoft operating systems as a desktop OS ever since. I moved to Windows 95, NT4, Windows 2000, XP, and finally Vista.

I found that fresh installs of Windows XP were nice and fast. But after installing/uninstalling programs, Windows would catch a sickness that would make the OS slow down. I found that every 3-6 months I had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall XP in order to get it back to top speed. My experience with Vista was much the same. After it got slow a second time, I decided I needed a change.

I almost went with Ubuntu Linux, but I had a non-Liferay email account that required Microsoft Exchange connectivity. So I ended up going with the Mac.

Yes, after 20 years (almost to the very day), I'm driving a Mac again. How about that!