Travel and Fine Art Photography. Articles and Images by Krish Mandal, New York Photographer

If you've been listening at all to the Apple commercials for the last couple of years, you might begin to believe that a Mac really is better than a PC. Granted, they are "cooler" and prettier, and smaller than a hulking PC, but is it truth or hype? Well, since I started working at Tallan, I've been given a MacBook Pro, with all the "fixin's" including a nice 23-inch Cinema flat panel. I had used a Mac before, but for 15 years before joining Tallan, I was a devoted PC guy. I know, you're wondering why this article is categorized under the Software heading if I'm going to talk about Macs and PCs. Well, trust me, it will be about operating systems and software ...

I know there are a lot of Mac devotees out there. And I have to concur, the Mac is a sweet machine. I was brought up on a Mac, so to speak. Actually, that's not entirely true, I was introduced to a Mac in college, and that's what I'm really referring to. Before that ... well, here's a little geek bio about my experience with computers. If you want to skip this portion, go down to the section "Meet the Future."

Computers in School

I started off learning BASIC for a week on a Radio Shack TRS-80 back in sixth grade (you know, those all in one terminal-looking thingies, where the keyboard and monitor were housed together). That was New York City's way of introducing computers to the educational system. And hard drives? Nope. Can you say 8.5 inch floppies? Yes, 8.5 inches. Soon however, the floppies came down to the 5 inch size. The next year in Junior High, I was introduced to the Commodore PET (a tiny little thing), where they tried to teach me more BASIC, and I completely failed to understand programming concepts. Actually what I misunderstood wasn't really the language, but that there was a syntax to the language. I didn't even know what syntax meant.

After the PET, came the Amiga that some friends owned, and then, after begging my dad for many months, my very own 16-color TRS-80, a computer housed in a bulky keyboard. Frankly, I wanted a real computer, but my dad wasn't going to pay $1000 for a new toy. So it was a cheapie from Radio Shack. It was basically something to type your own BASIC programs into. That is how I learned programming concepts in earnest, by following the introduction to BASIC book that came with it, and trying to type in all the programs in the back of the book. Then in High School, I got to work on the first IBM PCs. Still no hard drives, but we were doing cool things like hooking it up to a VCR with a BDC (Binary to Decimal Converter), and learning C (the language). At that time, other people were just starting to get their Apple IIe and IIc computers, and games were coming out on floppies which we all pirated using something called Pirates Chest, a floppy disk copier for copy-protected programs. This is where I began to fun computers could really be.

Meet the Future 

It was the end of the eighties, and I can say, the computer revolution was clearly under way at that point. When I started college at the University of Michigan, they had just built a brand new computer center and filled it with the first real Apple Macintosh computers. Back then, Apple's logo was still the rainbow-striped apple. The first version of Microsoft Word had come out, Cricket was the graphing program of choice, and 780K 2.25-inch floppies were a student's best friend. Hard drives were now becoming the storage media of choice on a computer, but still everything was very expensive. I was finding out that the college was networked to other colleges, and even the campus-wide network could be used in ways most students (with the exception of the Engineers) probably didn't know.  For instance, I would use the engineering computers on Michigan's North Campus to start writing a paper, save it to a place on the network (you had to know how to get there), and then finish it later in the day from somewhere on Central Campus. Doesn't sound like much now, but remember, this is somewhere about 1989-1990.

So when the popular media began buzzing about something called the World Wide Web soon after, I poo-poohed it, believing that it was just another extension of the good ole network I had already been using. Well, of couse, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Of course it was more networking, but the enormity of the concept didn't really hit me till much later on.