Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

One man’s journey from the darkness, into the light, and then back to the darkness, which turned out to be not as dark as he remembered.

I wanted to buy a Macintosh back in 1991 when I sold a bunch of stuff and managed to scrape together $1200 for a computer. Sadly, that left me about $1200 short with nothing left to sell. So instead I bought a XT running DOS 3.1 with 256k of RAM, a 20 meg hard drive, floppy drives, and an amber monochrome monitor. I’ve been joined to my computer(s) at the hip ever since.

What tends to happen is you begin the journey with a Mac or a PC, and you stick with it. Mac people swear they would rather die than switch, and given how they line up like lemmings to buy whatever their Apple overlords tell them to buy, I tend to believe them. PC users, on the other hand, tend to be classic geeks and nerds, which is understandable because these are the sort of people who want to get into their computers - into both the hardware and the software. The Mac hardware and software are locked up tighter than an Amish maiden, while every PC I’ve ever owned had a case held together by its one remaining screw and 2 or 3 hard drives hanging out the side. The last PC I built had a spare CD drive in it, just so I could have somewhere to put my coffee cup.

I thought I would see what all the fuss about Apples New OS X Leopard system is. Not much really.

I watched the guided tour and I was quite impressed by the shiny monitor, minimalist keyboard and mouse and the bloke doing the presentation. None of the features were original or new (from a PC perspective) with possibly the only exception being the ability to change video backgrounds in your chat window (though only with some one else who has Leopard as well.)