Bing!

For many years, I have been a member of the teensy market share held by Apple Computer. Some Windows users call us frothing fanatics. Some accuse us of bleeding in six colors. Some dare to call us elitists (just because we insist upon consistent user interfaces no matter what source - payware, shareware, freeware). Some just smile and shake their heads, weary of our complacent computing experiences, relatively untainted by crashes, viral attacks, incompatibilities and spyware.

Few realize just how addicted we Macaholics are, though.

I first met the Apple Macintosh under great duress. I'd seen a Lisa, listened to its owner wax poetic over its grace and beauty (although I never saw it with its power switched on - turns out the owner wasn't much of a computer user). But my first face-to-face encounter with the Mac was memorable mainly for its benign infiltration into my life.

It was a quiet day in November, a Tuesday, as I recall. I'd written a database for a customer, and they liked it - a lot. So much so that they wanted it to run on this new computer they'd acquired, with its itty bitty screen, perched silently like a predatory falcon or an owl waiting for prey.

Customer = always right. So I told Bill sure, I'll port the database over to that.. thing. But I'd need one on my desk to do it. (I was much younger then, and knew everything.)

The next day one of those ... things showed up on my desk, complete with a mouse. My realm of exposure to great computer products didn't at that time include rodents. I was command line or bust - DOS all the way. Windows was still a wild rumor that we laughed about around the water cooler and secretly prayed for once we were back at our command-line oriented desks.

I don't recall now if my IBM AT ever had one attached during its venerable lifetime. We performed very few modifications to that expensive box, although one afternoon in a fit of hubris usually reserved for mainframe board-level diagnostics, we swapped the onboard 512k RAM out and put in an entire MEG. Well, we didn't know about chip-matching; the process had to be repeated several times until we managed to get the entire secondary memory card populated with these chips without bending pins. The sole of my left foot still bears a tiny imprint near the heel where I 'found' one, which had to be discarded as a result. It had dropped into the carpet and turned invisible.

So there was the Mac on my desk, in all its miniature glory. Pretty tame looking when turned off. Safe. Quiet. Harmless.

I stared at this perched owl for about 10 minutes while I waited for the customer to show up. I stared at the mouse. I stared at the lack of manuals. There were none. To a hardcore IBM owner of the time, the lack of manuals was significantly disconcerting. How do you have a computer on your desk without the accompanying encyclopedia of knowledge?

Bill walked in and reached around to one side, and flicked a switch or waved a magic wand. A tiny Bing wafted from the device, followed by a tiny whir, and a tiny happy smiling face on the tiny window. Folks, there was something embedded in those first tiny Bings that was specially engineered to bring grins to faces. I was hooked.. it had me at hello.

Well, Bill started talking about what software was available, and how the database could be ported into this other software, and how he was sure I could figure it out, but frankly I didn't hear much of the discourse. I was driving my first Mac. I did little the rest of the morning except drive that little Mac around my desktop, entranced and enthralled at every turn. It whirred, it purred, it chirped, it hiccuped when it ejected its floppy. And I didn't get a blessed thing done for the entire morning, except get hooked like a wide-mouth bass.

After the first few hours, which ended with a reluctant unhooking, I turned back to the PC on my desk and tried to get the requisite work done. It loomed above the little perched owl of a thing, smirking in thinly disguised disgust. I found myself frustrated by the command line and searching for the mouse.

Bill called shortly after lunch to see how things were going. Did I like the Mac? I tried my best to be nonchalant, but the truth slipped out within a few minutes. I had to have one of these. Oh, Bill grinned through the phone. So how's the database port going? I explained that I had not quite gotten there (without confessing to not having pushed in the floppy containing the necessary items). I would do so tomorrow morning.

I could make this into a very long story, even longer than it's already become. But for those of you who are either yawning from sheer boredom or bristling at the thought of a *gasp* Macintosh doing anything productive - yes, I got the database done. Yes, they came and took my beloved Mac off my desk and back to the customer's site. My relationship with the IBM AT went downhill from that point, and I ended up with the first of a series of Macs on my desk within the following week of its departure. They ranged from the tiny to the huge, from the desktop version to the tower, back to the desktop to a portable, to the eMac I have in front of me now which is within eyesight of my laptop. Times have changed, and the Mac OS has raced forward to Tiger.

And I'm still hooked like a wide-mouth bass.