Given that experience, buying an Apple was a no-brainer. I bought a brand-new 500MHz iBook, with all of 256MB RAM. (This, compared to the Amiga's 33MB I had never been able to fill in ordinary usage.) I really wanted a blueberry clamshell -- if you're going to go crazy, go crazy in style, no? -- alas, those had been phased out. I was stuck with a colorless, all-white iBook. Yuck. At least it ran Maple. I named her Parvula, and hoped for the best.
This was August of 2001, and OS X was still new (and still slow as molasses in winter). I didn't mind the slowness too much; what mattered to me was that it ran Maple, and it wasn't Microsoft or Linux. My machine dual-booted OS X and OS 9. Maple ran only in "classic" mode: that is, it required OS 9 emulation within OS X. So starting Maple was a chore that required me to wait, and wait, and wait... wishing all the time that my university had standardized on Mathematica instead, with its polished Aqua interface. To my dismay, the CD-burner didn't write under OS X 10.0, but that was fixed before too long.
At the time, there were very, very few Apples around the department. Linux was all the rage. There was talk that our university would soon be taking the cost-cutting measure of eliminating Windows and moving everything to Linux. That long-promised switch to Linux never actually took place, although one public lab in my building has switched to Linux and OpenOffice, another to Linux and CrossOver Office.
Insane, perhaps, but not entirely isolated
Most of my colleagues thought me insane, and said so.
Ray was the only one who owned an Apple. (Note: names have been changed, to protect the guilty.) He owned a nice PowerBook, and was lusting after a Cube. (Remember those?) He and I would chatter about our machines while my officemates rolled their eyes, or asked when we would remove that Mac virus, and install YellowDog Linux. Both of us were interested in the huge amount of Unix software being ported to OS X, through the outstanding work of the Fink project. I invested some hours learning how to fink -install some-program and later to dselect. Then came Fink Commander, and life became easier. Coming from a Realm Linux world where state-of-the-art was the antiquated rpm --install some.rpm, then gnashing my teeth in dependency hell (I never had to worry about that during ten years of installing Amiga software -- but maybe I was lucky), it seemed just a little ironic that Debian's dselect masterpiece was perfected... on a Mac. Soon thereafter I was using my iBook not only to run Maple computations, but to type results and reports using Lyx, XFig, and the whole gamut of TeX-related software, and showing Ray how to get fink, X, and the rest running on his PowerBook. (Ray however prefers TeXShop to Lyx.) I've even downloaded Loria's SmartEiffel browser and refreshed my memory of the Eiffel programming language. Both of us also enjoyed indulging in our non work-related, "consumer" uses of our Apples; here Ray had a definite advantage, since with a video camera he could create an entertaining video of his two year-old son running buck nekkid about the house).
We were both pretty happy with our machines.
Fast-forward nearly three years
Realm Linux finally became useable. With the advent of KDE 3.1, and the attendant eye-candy from Everaldo's Crystal icons and Keramik, Linux also became pleasant to use. (Except when RealPlayer decided not to work -- but owyn is a work computer, and there are more important concerns.) For a while, I explored the idea of converting the iBook to Yellow Dog Linux. In the end, I decided to stick with OS X...
...Mostly because OS X has also spent the last three years improving. I don't have to pay full price for the OS upgrades -- nowhere near full price, to tell the truth -- so I didn't mind the yearly subsidy of Apple's software group. Besides, the upgrades have been worth it. Upgrading has been remarkably smooth overall. It is especially gratifying to type this at a time when one of my colleagues has struggled for a full week to get two of the Linux machines in the office to upgrade from Realm Linux/RedHat 8 to Realm Linux/Fedora Core 1.
Maple 9 finally runs natively on the Mac, albeit only in the new, ugly, slowish, Java-interface worksheet mode. Still, it allowed me finally to eliminate Classic emulation from my machine. In addition, I ran it overnight and found a counterexample to a conjecture I'd been trying for a long time to prove -- no wonder I couldn't prove it; it was false! With that one stroke, my PowerPC G3 machine justified my investment. The dual 1GHz Pentium running Linux SMP didn't find the counterexample; such are the vagaries of Fortune and pseudo-random code. :-)
The iBook has proven itself enormously useful in pretty much every aspect of my professional life, as well as many aspects of my non-professional life. The most mundane task of all is record-keeping for the occasional class I teach: recording grades and attendance (Appleworks), writing syllabi (Mozilla), tests (TeX), etc. There's also a lot of fun to be had in digital photos, iTunes, and reading OSNews with the Camino web browser.
- "Apple in Academia, Page 1/3"
- "Apple in Academia, Page 2/3"
- "Apple in Academia, Page 3/3"
