I found this at Curmudgeonry and since it fits well with my current level of available brain power I'm going to answer the Thursday Three.

1) What was your first computer?

The family started with a Commodore 64, I was in high school at the time. I did the usual idiotic basic programming that every kid with a 64 did, and I used it to write my first editorial for my college newspaper. We didn't have a printer so I wrote it on the 64 then copied it by hand. The paper didn't have computers, so I banged it out on a typewriter and handed it off to they typesetter who typed it again. Wow. Technology was making me efficient.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a Tandy 1000. I moved up to writing with WordStar, and obsessed over a text based adventure game called Amnesia. I wrote lots of really crappy really juvenile short stories on that system.

Then I got a job a place that had Macs. I was home. My first Mac was the Portable. Apple's 15 pound precourser for the PowerBook. Not intended as a laptop but as a desktop you could easily take with you. (An idea whose time never quite came.) I still have it. I think it even still runs. It was eventually replaced by a Mac Performa that in its day made the Portable look like the Commodore, but that now seems not much better than the Tandy. It is still in use in my daughters room, though without internet access since it it doesn't have ethernet capability.

The current system is the ill fated G4 Cube. A very capable machine that suited, and still suits, my performance and space needs in a home computer. Though a Mini might do both better. These days I do pretty much everything on my work system. The company bought me a 17“ G4 PowerBook. It's up to the task most of the time, but it kind of struggles when I start pushing around 500MB PhotoShop files.

2) What is the worst thing you ever encountered dealing with a computer?

I have been lucky not to have had any real disasters with my personal systems. There was the one time I was writing an epic short story on the Tandy, with the music blaring, a few cold beers and a thunderstorm raging outside. It was a moment of manic creativity. Let's just say there as no auto-save feature in those days and leave it at that. When the college paper finally got computers there was the day smoke started pouring out of the back of one of the CRTs of the Compugraphics system. Or the day our basement offices flooded and the $20k image setter was in 3 inches of water. Luckily there were no electronics in the bottom 3 inches. At that job where I discovered Macs we did have system go nuts in the process of running a back-up. This resulted in scrambling the hard drive and the back-up and the manual recreation of 6 months of accounting data.

3) What is your favorite piece of software?

This may be the hardest question of the three. I make my living using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I'd have to label that as more of a love hate kind of relationship. I'm not sure if an operating system counts under this question but I am quite fond of OS X. I would rank Apple's Safari browser near the top also. But I would have to say my favorite is the program I'm using now. A nifty $18 piece of shareware called Ecto that is an excellent blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, and more.

I realize that I could have done this in three quick sentences that answered the basic questions but where's the fun in that?

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 05:14 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment