Let me start off by saying I’ve not been a mac user since the beginning. The first PC at our home was a Commodore PC 20-II. Which my dad manage to crash the first day we got it back in 1987.
My first every Computer
My interest in computer did not start until I was around 16, before that I was just using computer for gaming. Which I played mostly at friends’ house since we did not get new computer until 1997 that was able to run the games I liked. When we got a new Pentium 166 MXX and Windows. This was a huge step forward from the old dos machine we had before. Soon after getting this machine I bought my first own machine, a second-hand 386, which I pimped the hell out off. Added an sound card, CD-rom player and even got it to boot Windows 95.
Then for my 18 birthday I got a new machine, a nice Windows machine which really changed my live. I started programming, first in Visual Basic and later in Delphi.
Around that time all the old machines were still in my room and we were playing games via a LAN networks. A friend of mine had an old Mac which I got when they switch to Windows, the machine had a Apple Portrait Display, sorta like a wide screen but then in the vertically. It came without any Operating system disk and was my first go at mac OS 7. Because it was lacking any operating disks I could not restore the machine and it booted with error about missing system files. Eventually I sold the machine to someone who was interested in the monitor. After that I got one of the first iMacs, blue of course.
I did not do anything with the Mac until after graduation. At college (HBO) I started using Linux because it allowed to me to tweak my system, liking the unix like OS I was always feeling a bit handicapped in Windows. Seeing that some of my classmates bought MacBooks around this time, I was once again interested in Macs. I liked the fact that they just pulled their notebook from their bags and start working on them, no booting and a standby mode that worked.
After graduating and getting a job a C# developer I did not think long about buying a new machine for long. At this point the first Apple iPhone was introduced and talk about Android started. I was really interested in getting an Android phone at that time, since it was running Linux. A system that I knew and liked. So I downloaded the development kit and arrrrggg java. No this could not be right. I really dislike Java as programming language because of it structure. At the same time I was also looking for a new notebook and a friend bought a MacBook a year before. He showed me how his new MacBook was doing about 4 hours on battery and could run Windows, if you really needed it. So that was it then I order a black MacBook.
Soon after getting my shining new MacBook the iPhone 3G was available for sale in the Netherlands and also the T-Mobile G1. I was lucky enough to get my hand on both devices, because colleagues had got them, my first reaction was “wow the iPhone is fast”. The T-Mobile G1 felt like a piece of plastic that was about the break, let alone that the operation system did not feel very finished.
Since I could renew my contract about that time I ordered an iPhone, moving away from my idea of getting an Android phone. I received the my iPhone not much later with an unlimited mobile data subscription, wow those where the days.
Not soon after I started to code some small apps in Objective-C, which really took some getting used to coming from a C# background. But I loved the memory management language since it allowed me so much control.
The company that I then worked for had some big clients. One of them was really interested in getting an app in the AppStore. They wanted a radio streamer, which I happened have build myself because I liked to listen Zeilsteen. This radio stream for this client became my first ever released App, just before Zeilsteen.