When I first started to use Macs in the late 1980s, I was the oddball. Most users of personal computers worked on traditional, text-based PCs, such as the ones from IBM. When I visited a computer store — yes there were many of those — to buy apps for my Mac, the clerks often gave […]

It all started when I was 13 or thereabouts; it was the late 1950s. My mother worked as a clerk typist, and I decided I needed to learn to type so I could write about my favorite subject at the time, flying saucers. So she agreed to rent one, and gave me quick guidance as […]

It took several decades for Macs to catch up. I mean, you could type text quickly enough, even if you were a speedy typist. But it would often seem to take forever to save even a small word processing file. Dealing with multimedia files, rendering, converting or saving, sometimes meant long minutes — or hours […]

The best way for me to put this in perspective is to turn back the hands of time to my early days as the owner of a personal computer, in the mid-1980s. In those days, I was in a position to upgrade frequently, even though it was fair to say that I could put off […]