Son of Timatollah

My "personal" computer for the past five years has been an IBM Think Pad T22. It's been a wonderful machine: Reliable, sturdy, clean. I have loved the Track Point ("the nub of joy") device as opposed to a touch pad kind of thingee.

Today, five years by the day of the week since I bought my T22, I bought a Mac Book Pro with a 15.4" display, 2.16 GHz chip, 100 GB at 7200 RPM disk, etc. I couldn't justify a 17" display or the physical size of a 17" display for a laptop. Hell, 15.4" seems too big! So, I've just spent the past couple of hours transfering mail profiles, browser settings, etc. Everything seems cool, so far. Mack has been running Mac OS X for several years on a 12" iBook, so I have experienced help around.

I was an early adopter. I believe the S/N of my original Macintosh toaster (128K memory) was number 648. It was something in the 600s, anyway. Before that, it was a TRS 80 machine (16K, tape dump for BASIC programs). After that, I had a NeXT machine at work during grad school, then some kind of Sun Solaris box and an NT box during my first teaching gig at Memphis. My first Laptop was an IBM 760 that I ran Red Hat Linux on, eventually -- because one of Red Hat's upgrades was as arrogant a piece of take-over-your-machine shit as any Microsoft product -- replacing it with Windows 98. The 760 got replaced by the T22 and Windows 2000.

I'll download boot camp, and install Windows XP at work on Monday. I can't get completely out of the Microsoft Universe at this point, and there are Windows applications I've been running that aren't available in Intel form for the Mac yet, too (Photoshop Elements and Microsoft's Office suite come to mind), so I'll be doing the dual boot nonsense for the next year or so.

Immedate response: Impressive, very impressive. It's one fast mofo of a computer.

I have to learn my way around, but so far it is sweet.