It was the last time I lost all my data to a virus in 1999 that made me wonder if there was a better way of improving the lot of the average computer user. Windows, whatever version, is a large target for any malware author, so I began with a brief switch to linux/aix and solaris – which worked to an extent for me, in that it stopped me doing real paid work and let me waste my time with incessant fiddling with init.d and assorted shell scripts. An education, sure, but it didn’t put food on the table. And then Lotus/IBM dropped the unix client for Lotus Notes and I was forced back into the misery of windows.
Guess what – more viruses, more BSODs and generally more misery – plus reduced battery life that meant I had a laptop that wouldn’t last the hour and a half commute to work. During this brief sojourn I was still keeping one eye on OS X – an OS that I had known, loved and used as NextStep for many years. I even had a black NeXT cube at one point, but I digress. In 2002 then, I bought my first mac for many years, a cube. I maxed it out to 1.5gb, I upgraded it left right and centre to run the fastest processor going, and set about seeing what the delta was between XP and OS X. Well, I was pleased at the time that MS Office presented no issues, all the Adobe products I might use were there, and wow, there was a Lotus Notes client….sadly though, it didn’t work. Well, it did, but it didn’t understand fonts at all, and rendered most of my work as unintelligable gibberish. Nevermind, I thought, Virtual PC should solve this. It didn’t. I ended up with an inane mix of a small PC running on my network that I remotely ran via VNC. This wasn’t ideal, but OK. So – I became a mac user. I especially loved the fact that the terminal program would do a delightful green on black to make me feel child-like again…
Then in 2005/6 Apple announced it was going to move to the intel platform, and since then I have followed the antics of a community of people that are committed (or they should be) to running
OS X on non-apple hardware. I’ve tried it several times – and actually lived with one for a year or so, but nothing seemed to quite match the Apple hardware….until last year. Quite by chance, I bought a Dell 490 for a client and noticed that it’s spec was identical to the then current Mac Pro. So I had a go at installing OS X on it. Well, I’m still using it. I can’t let go of it. It has 32gb ram and two quad core xeons. I’m sure you’ll agree that is overkill for most things, but for the first time in – oh, 10 years, I have a proper workstation that runs like stink, does everything I want it to do, and is still unthreatened by viruses and malware. But the best thing of all is that I can run VMWare Fusion on it, and I have copies of every OS I have ever used, right from dos 3.3 through to Windows 7 – all available to me at the click of a mouse. I can even run – count them – eight VMs simultaneously with it barely registering an increase in fan speed. I don’t need a separate W2K3 server, it is a VM. I don’t need a separate domino server – it is a VM. In fact, I’ve managed to replicate almost every hosting environment I could ever need to, from solaris to linux, all in one box. Hmm. Loads to fiddle with, but how much productivity is there in that?
Well, the answer to that is that when things “Just Work” TM, you don’t need to fiddle with stuff incessantly. A new project using wordpress? Fire up an appliance, configure wordpress and go. Joomla? Start the Joomla environment. It is too easy, really, when I look back on the days when if I needed a new “server” of any description, it would take a day to install and configure. It has set me wondering if this is the IT equivalent of the disposable consumer society that I have come to despise (throwing a toaster out? Did you check the fuse?) – that “environments” that were created and maintained as a result of time and effort can just be disposed of without a second thought? One day, and it may come soon, we’ll have lost the skills that allowed us to create a centos 4.0 domino server on linux, and OS/2 LAN server or a version of netBSD that allows Nintendo 64 development tools to run. Think back to running DOS. Could you edit a config.sys file with edlin, still?I know I’m an old fart, and that I am a packrat when it comes to knowledge about old IT skills, but I really worry that I am turning into the old nerd in the corner of the pub that suggests that a twin disk setup for your cpm/80 might solve all your problems…
My “hackintosh” does need me to keep those skills I acquired with NextSTEP to keep it running, but only if I upgrade the OS or add hardware that doesn’t fit the apple envelope,but guess what? I bought a Mac Pro anyway….
richardsandwell 