One of the first things I did was get TeX installed, which went pretty smoothly with Gerben Wierda’s now-deprecated i-Installer. That 4:3 screen looks weird nowadays, doesn’t it? So I got a 12″ iBook G4 in either December 2004 or January 2005, a wonderful little machine that I just retired this past December after six years of faithful service. But by late 2004, the hardware seemed cool enough and fast enough to be workable. I’d blocked enough airflow out of its “chimney” that it overheated and shut down to protect itself. The first time I saw a Cube, I put my hand over the top of it-not touching it, mind you, keeping at least an inch away-and caused an immediate shutdown. There was no way I could have that sitting on my thighs. I’d lift up a laptop and practically burn my hand on the underside. Most of that time, what impressed me about Macs was how goddamned hot they ran. During my Linux years, whenever I was in a computer store, I’d go over to the Mac section and have a look. I would not move to a non-Unix or substandard Unix platform. This was important because my Linux days had taught me how wonderful Unix was, especially for someone who worked mainly with text files. OS X’s teething days were over and had become, with Panther, a decent Unix environment.
I wanted to spend more time using my computers and less time configuring them. And getting Linux installed and running well on a laptop, where there was no opportunity to mix and match components, was a dicey proposition. Linux had made great strides in compatibility in the years I’d been using it, but I still had to make sure there were drivers for the internal cards and peripherals I bought for my desktop computer.
If you’re late to the party, here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 3.5. Yesterday’s release of BBEdit 10 has spurred me to finally get this post written, a good three months after the last one in the series. Next post Previous post Text files and me IV - BBEdit and TextMate
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