It's funny how much a difference a couple of months can make. I have used the Mac OS in some form or another since 1987. I was there for the transition to color monitors, the addition of the CD-ROM drive, eWorld, the transition to PowerPC (painful at times, remember 7.5.2?), the clones, their death and so on. As I've noted here before, when 10.1 and Microsoft Office V.X were released this fall, I went to Mac OS X full time.

I rarely boot the Classic environment, only when I need Photoshop and Fireworks, and aside from that, never. I've had to eat some nails along the way, but I've adapted and embraced Mac OS X. It's not perfect, but I do like it. There are things there that I've wanted for a long time, like a command line interface(can you believe that I was missing DOS when I wasn't on a Windows machine?), and it just doesn't crash. Others have had different experiences there, but for me it's been rock solid as both a desktop and server OS so far.(I have just jinxed myself.)

Today, I went over a friends house to configure her brand new iMac. Not the cool new Luxor iMac, but one of the older Snow ones. She needs to use Quark and a couple of other apps that aren't available for Mac OS X yet, so she'll be running Mac OS 9 for the time being. I booted the machine, and began installing updates. All I could think of the entire time was how old fashioned the operating system seemed to me now. I've learned how to use Mac OS X, and the operating system that was like an old friend a couple of months ago now seems like a distant relative I only see once a year. It was almost shocking. I still know how to do everything, but it all seemed foreign. It's for this reason that I know that Apple is on the right road with their operating system. Oh, there's resistance from some people, but people are always scared of change. We're quite close to having Flash and Photoshop over here, and that's the tipping point. Unaddressed issues with things like fonts will get dealt with then, of that I'm quite certain. So goodbye old friend, we had a great fourteen years together.