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Happy New Year, everybody!

On Thanksgiving night last month, CompUSA ran a special where they offered a deal where you could get 24 months 0% interest on any Apple product purchase over $999. I’ve been eyeing a 24″ iMac for a while, and decided to take the plunge. I was talking with a friend today about some of the challenges I’ve encountered, and he asked me if I’d posted anything abou this to my blog. Hey, I’m just a programmer; blogs don’t live at the front of my mind — I usually post stuff here after-the-fact.

But in the context of “useful content”, I suspect that this path is probably of broad interest, and thus worth blogging about. So here we go! This is the first of many installments where I’ll be documenting my travails in acquiring a new iMac — this from the perspective of someone who’s worked with Windows and DOS forever. (It might be useful to add that I spent a couple of years working at Motorola learning Unix and C before I ever encountered MS-DOS. So, in a way, getting into the iMac — which runs a Unix variant under the hood — is like coming home.)

I’ve been programming professionally since 1979, closing in on 30 years now. Ugh! Seems like just yesterday I was learning to program in BASIC in High School. And that was 1972. I’ve worked with so many operatings systems and programming languages over the years that I can’t count them all. It would be inappropriate to call me any kind of bigot when it comes to software or operating systems. Sure, I’ve got my favorites, like Delphi for programming (which uses a Pascal dialect). But as far as operating systems or environments go … hey, who cares. If they do the job, that’s great.

It happens that 90% of the market has been controlled by Microsoft for the past couple of decades, and 90% of all computers in the world run some version of their Windows operating system. So it’s hard to avoid, personally or professionally.

Since Apple first introduced their Macintosh computer back in 1984, the computing world has been fascinated. My mother wanted to write a book, and I urged her to get a Mac, simply because I didn’t want to have to endure the endless support questions that I knew would ensue if she got a Windows-based machine. So she purchased one of those early all-in-one monochrome Macs with a 3.5″ floppy drive in it, along with an external 3.5″ floppy drive. She kept complaining that it was too slow, so we upgraded to an external 10MB hard drive. Boy, that made ALL the difference!

After several years and a LOT of mileage on the keyboard, that old box finally fizzled. We upgraded my mom to one of the newer Mac C3’s. This was a “pizza box” that had a monitor propped on top of it. It also had a built-in 25MB hard drive. Woo-hoo!

I have to confess that I’d frequently stop by my mom’s house and use her Mac’s to do various kinds of drawing tasks, like flow charts and network diagrams. That was because the Mac has always come with lots of really useful software right out of the box. Similar kinds of drawing tools for Windows have always cost a pretty penny.

Honestly, I’ve always wanted a Mac. But since the bulk of my professional activities depend on the Windows environment, a Mac has never been anything other than an expensive toy.

When Apple announced they were going to be switching all of their machines over to use Intel CPUs, I knew I’d finally get a Mac sooner rather than later. I just wanted to wait until I’d be able to run my important Windows software on the Mac.

As it happened, there was a contest to see who could create the first tool to allow you to run Windows or a Windows-based program under the Mac OS, called OS-X. The race was on, and it wasn’t long before someone demonstrated the desired result, and won $10k in the process.

Apple themselves introduced something called Bootcamp that allows you to boot up your Mac to run either OS-X or Windows, although I’m not sure why you’d want to do that. Apple execs said they weren’t sure why anybody would want to run Windows at all, but that’s another story. (Maybe because there are guys like me who earn a living from a whole boatload of Windows software that we can’t replace with Mac work-alikes.)

While Bootcamp is still available (for free), a better piece of software has come along. It’s called Parallels, and it’s used to create what are called “Virtual Machines” that run within your Mac’s operating environment.

Basically, you load your copy of Parallels into your Mac, just like any other Mac program. When you run it, you can create a new Virtual Machine and start it running. In essence, you open a window into what appears to be a brand spanking new computer with access to everything your physical computer has attached to it, but no operating system. You simply load up a copy of whatever operating system you want, reboot it, and you’re off and running!

In my case, I purchased a massive 24″ iMac that comes equipped with 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and the usual complement of Apple software, including OS-X 10.4 “Tiger” edition.

I also purchased a copy of Parallels and Windows XP (SP2) Home Edition to load into it. And that’s where the adventure REALLY begins!

To be continued…

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