© Joel Davies 7-11-01

I read somewhere that the most passionate evangelists are those who have been converted to either a new religion or back to their original faith. The following three columns are the story of how I was lured to the Wintel world, my experiences as a Wintel user, and my return to the Mac fold.

I grew up with Apple computers in my household, but in college I was slowly converted to the Wintel world. As an elementary school student, I played with the home Apple IIe constantly — making graphics on the Koala pad, learning Apple Basic, and best of all, pirating games. Captain Goodnight, Choplifter and Karateka were a constant source of entertainment.

During my freshman year of college, my parents decided that I would benefit from a computer in my dorm room. I was driving them nuts by showing up at their house at all hours to frantically fire out research papers and writing assignments. Finally, I was shuttled over to Best Buy to pick out a computer. At first, I was pretty skeptical about these PCs — I had become used to my friend’s LC II, which I thought was the baddest machine I had ever seen (4MB RAM? Get out!).

However, I was quickly seduced to the dark side by a couple of factors. One: my parents would buy me a PC — right then, right there. Two: there was this innocuous little section of software titled “Games”. Right in the center of the display was a box titled “X-Wing.” Being a Star Wars fan, I thought this was pretty cool, so I wandered over and pick up the box. I turned it over, and was instantly gripped by the dark side.

There were these amazing screen shots of Space Battles, and the box claimed to be an immersive 3D gaming experience. Cool. Ring up one PC. I lugged the monstrosity to my dorm room to show off the new machine to my friends, and was shocked to discover that I was going to have to learn all kinds of nasty stuff in order to play the game.

“Wait a minute, you mean I have to create a boot disk in order to free up enough memory to launch the game — and then I’ll have to reboot to get back into Windows 3.1?”

“What do you mean 640k — my dad paid an extra grand to upgrade to 8 megs of RAM!”

“Joystick not included!? &*%$!”

After some more swearing and spitting, and another trip to Best Buy for a joystick, I was ready to rock. I fired up the machine (Mac user Brian was still marveling at the CD-ROM drive and 66MHz emblazoned on the grill) and let fly with a burst of sci-fi death at the hordes of Imperial starfighters. We all gathered around the screen for a good three hours marveling at the graphics. I was in awe of what the game played like, never mind the complete pain in the rear setup.

After a weekend of brain-numbing gaming, we spent a week in classes, anticipating a long Friday afternoon of blowing up the Empire. However, a guy two floors up gave me a disk labeled “Wolfenstein” after hearing about second floor’s new arcade machine. He claimed this game would “rock my world.” Even though he actually said that to another person OUT LOUD, I decided to trust him and try this Wolfenstein. I actually could recall a very cool Apple IIe game called “Castle Wolfenstein” where you had to march around a bunch of rooms and show guys papers (or something like that — I was eight, so give me a break).

Well, this version of Wolfenstein was WAY different. Game play basically consisted of blowing the hell out of everything in sight. It was our first 3D shooter in the dorm, and one of my funniest memories of that night was my friend Greg (also known as “Psycho”, but that’s another story) leaning around the monitor to see around the corners on screen.

Needless to say, a hardcore computer gamer was born (maybe reborn) in that dorm room, and still today I love to rip through newbie scum in Multiplayer Quaking.

In graduate school — four years later in 1996 — I began to use the computer as an art-making tool, and really started using that old license of Photoshop that had been dormant on my machine. I had a newer PC, and this time a 266mHz behemoth with a then unheard of 128MB (this was in 1996) of RAM. I even had a copy of Windows 95, which I was assured would “change the face of personal computing” (don’t get mad and write — remember I do come back to sanity). I was having a great time, although my efforts were being looked upon with some scorn by the other design students in the Mac lab.

The G3 was still speculation, and the really cool games and 3D software continued to be unavailable to the Mac world. If a game was published, it was months after the PC version had been played out. My PC was clobbering the Macs in our lab from a performance standpoint (probably based on the RAM installation) and I began to look down upon Macs as poor graphics machines. They did not have 3D accelerators, unlike my brand-spanking new Voodoo card, there was a pitiful selection of 3D software, and my version Photoshop ran circles around the Macs in the lab.

If you recall, there was also speculation that Apple would cease to exist. They had suffered an amazing $740 million loss in early 1996, while Microsoft and Intel were teaming up for a what appeared to be the knockout punch. I was fairly disgusted at Apple’s poor strategy for enticing graphics students — there was really no software available outside of the design standards, and the price of the hardware was pretty high compared to PCs. One Apple rep actually pitched the Twentieth Anniversary Mac to a group of us poor, government-cheese-eating fine arts graduate students. What a bargain, for only 10 grand! Was Apple out of its collective mind?

Just prior to my December 1997 graduation, just when it seemed Apple was down for the count, this new machine called the G3 was announced…

TO BE CONTINUED... Will Joel escape from the grip of the Dark Side? Will he give in to temptation resulting in the Fall of Mankind? Will Apple come to its wits? Stay tuned, same Mac time, same Mac channel — Holy exploding Dells Mac Man!!

I verified some dates and numbers at http://www.apple-history.com - a fabulous site for looking back at your favorite models…

Joel Davies