Illustrated History of Josh's Computing Development

1983-1992

Apple IIe

My father apparently tried to teach me to program in BASIC on either an Apple IIe or an Apple II. I can't have been more than 7 years old at the time.

Apple Macintosh Plus

Not sure what I did with this really. Probably not a whole lot. It had an external 10 megabyte hard disk drive if I recall correctly. And an 8MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor! [1]

1993-1995

Apple Macintosh Classic II

Perhaps my first 'real' computer. I must have got this when I was around 8 years old. Powered by a blisteringly fast 16MHz Motorola 68030 microprocessor [2] this baby even had an internal 40 megabyte hard disk drive! Woaa! I suppose I must have had about 4 megabytes of RAM. Like the Plus, it had a built-in, 9 inch monochrome display.

HyperCard

On this computer I would have used HyperCard a lot. HyperCard was my first experience using a programming language to make the computer do stuff. The language in HyperCard was a powerful English-like scripting language called HyperTalk surprisingly. In it's hey-day HyperCard was the best thing since flying toasters. Eventually it died a long and agonising death in the bright light of colour monitors and abandonment by Apple. It was sad to see it go.

1995-1998

Apple Macintosh LC III

Seen here without a screen, this was one of many hand-me-downs from my father. Before I was old enough to get first priority when a new computer joined the family!

Apple Power Macintosh 6100/60AV

Another one of Dad's old computers. This one was rather special having an audio-visual (AV) card to allow video input. Around 1995 the family moved to Port Moresby, PNG for a year. A lot of stuff was sold and somehow the old 6100 ended up sitting in the lounge room with it's 12 inch apple colour display and a video-tape recorder as our TV.

1999

Apple iMac Revision C (Strawberry)

How embarassing! I had a strawberry flavoured computer. I never actually licked it so perhaps it didn't really taste like strawberry at all...

These iMac all-in-ones were one of the first in a line of colourful new hardware designs that came about around 1998, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. It was responsible for turning Apple around, back to profits and an increased market share. It was also the beginning of the end of the 3.25 inch floppy disk drive; another first for Apple.

Around this time I was in Mackay and going to high school. As part of the school's work experience programme I applied for a job with a local internet service provider. Things went well and I worked there doing web site programming and shop maintenance for several years on and off.

The high school was teaching Borland Delphi at the time. The environment was an early rapid-application-development style integrated development environment. Say that ten times quickly. The programming language was a modern dialect of Pascal.

My father actually stumbled across this product after hearing me complain that there was nothing like Dephi for the Mac. It was love at first sight. Ironic given how much greif this product would cause me later on in my career.

Apple PowerBook 1400c

2000-2003

Apple iMac G4

Some people said it looked like a desk lamp. I thought it was cool. The dome shaped base housed a power-supply, hard disk, circular motherboard, memory, CD-ROM drive and all the other usual suspects. There was a clever, sprung plastic flap in the front of the case that the CD drawer would hide behind.

It was around this time that I had access to MacOS X (still in it's infancy at the time, around version 10.1.) I began reading up on Cocoa and Objective-C, the environment being pushed by Apple for Mac development at the time.

I also wrote much C code during this time.

Somewhere along the line I got interested in the more popular C++. Frankly I don't like the language. Compared to Java, C sharp or even REALbasic I find it frustrating and limited. I'm sure if I gave it more time I could become proficient at it, but it's certainly not high on my agenda...

Again, with some sense of irony I ended up teaching much of the C++ class at TAFE due the abilities of the 'teacher' we were lumped with at the time. I seem to remember having a disagreement with him at some stage in one of the exams. I wasn't quite as tollerant of other people's stupidity as I am now. Although it's safe to say I probably have a way to go in that regard. Still, plenty of people to practice on eh!

2004

Apple PowerBook G3

Intel Celeron 1.7 GHz, 256 MB RAM, later upgraded to include a 15" LG LCD and Sony DVD burner

So my parents bought this to help me out when I started an undergraduate degree at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ). I had just finished an 18 month TAFE diploma and the undergraduate degree was full of general business subjects and electives, none of which interested me. If I'm not interested, I can't do it. Simple as that. I got 100% in one of my Oracle exams, a distinction for my Java subject and proceeded to fail marketing 3 times.

2005

Apple iBook G4

Another gift from my folks. It has a 1.2GHz 'G4' processor. Actually the processor has a much more boring sounding internal name that Apple didn't use. Versions were made by IBM and Motorola I think. I'm still using this little lappy right now to type all this out. It's done a few years but the battery long since died.

2009

Intel Pentium E5300 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM

Having embarked upon what looks to be a many-years-long process of learning to fly, I purchased this PC as a flight-simulator machine. It should also be useful for remote access to work sometimes, and perhaps some of my latest university study. Yeah, years later I'm back at it, this time doing my masters in computer science. And I still don't have an undergraduate degree!

Apple iPhone

Not strictly a 'computer' in the purest sense, but I maintain the days of beige boxes sitting motionless on our desks are rapidly drawing to a close.

I've obtained an iPhone on my latest cell phone contract. The large colour, touch-screen and on screen Qwerty keyboard were two of the big issues for me. My previous phone, the Nokia N95i is an awesome phone, but it's slow and doesn't have a Qwerty keyboard.

What is particularly interesting from a historical perspective is how far we've come in terms of minaturisation and computing performance. The iPhone 3GS (of which I am now a lucky user) has a 600 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, 32 GB of storage and a 3D graphics processor. All of that in something thinner than my wallet and not much taller than a credit card. This thing is comparable to my original strawberry iMac or rediculous compared to earlier Mac models.

The end of an era

On Saturday, 24 October 2009, I officially delegated by faithful iBook to the scrap heap. Still going strong, the almost 5-year old laptop is starting to show it's age. The N key no longer has any marking on it, and several other keys are fading.

It is the first day in my life where my primary computer is a Windows PC and not an Apple Mac.

Essentially there are two ways in which I use my technology today; out and about, and at home. The iPhone is far more mobile compared to the iBook and almost as powerful. The PC with it's widescreen is an excellent home entertainment system and somewhere to spread out when the iPhone's screen is too limiting. Essentially the move is entirely practical and has little to do with my feelings for either platform. Incidentally I don't like either platform much, or Linux. As can be seen elsewhere on my site, my feelings toward the state-of-the-art in desktop computing today are bordering on manic depressive.

Works Cited

1. G. Sanford. (2009, Apr.). Macintosh Plus [Online]. Available: http://www.apple-history.com/plus
2. G. Sanford. (2009, Apr.). Macintosh Classic II [Online]. Available: http://www.apple-history.com/classic_ii

Other Sources

Most of the images were obtained from apple-history.com, since I no longer have the machines.