Red Hat Diaries/007e

TWTYTW

That was the year that was. 2002. Starting officially on 17 January for me, 1 February for Sydney. It's been a long year and a lot has happened. These Red Hat Diaries do not have dates on the articles, which is a shame. Too late to do anything about that now. But the time frame is basically this: Syd and I started looking around for alternative Wintel boxes (with which to run RedHat Linux) in the fall of 2001. Boxes that were laptops (notebooks). We got stymied - stuck - because everything we looked at was junk.

We immediately saw that this new notebook market was the biggest rip-off ever. Companies rushing to get questionable hardware out the door. Poor quality with poor design. Computers that by design wouldn't last long anyway - and which were eminently susceptible to the kinds of everyday accidents that, if they befell desktops or towers, wouldn't matter one iota - but which in addition were built to fall apart.

We visited Consumer Affairs online and found out that this was no secret: All the Wintel manufacturers save one were castigated, denigrated, and generally damned for putting out crappy hardware and for having less than worthless order and support departments.

And there was only one company at that time which was not on the 'bad guys' list, and they were deemed to be the diametric opposite: They were clearly 'good guys'. They were Apple.

Apple was now Unix, and the Linux desktops were obviously trying to emulate (to copy) the Apple Aqua interface, and Apple's 'Aqua' was built on NextStep, a relatively unknown platform which nevertheless managed to wow almost every developer and user who'd seen it. The World Wide Web was created on a NextStep box.

A few more enquiries, a few visits to our local retailer, and we were convinced. And the hardware was dazzling. I opted for the impressive titanium PowerBook, Syd for the sturdy iBook. We ordered at the same time, but a misunderstanding resulted in her machine arriving two full weeks after mine.

We've been basically happy with our machines, but a lot has happened.

While Syd got her machine just for everyday use (and too many games), I got mine to test a theory.

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