I’m sitting, writing this post while holed up in the junk room at home. I’m sitting in front of a desk with two monitors on it – one connected to a hulking PC that can out-perform most supercomputers, and the other connected to a svelte brushed aluminium slab – a Mac mini. Across the room my work laptop sits on a stand next to a monitor and keyboard, and behind me a Raspberry Pi 500 sits connected to yet another monitor.
The eleven year old me would have loved this room.
When I was younger, I was quite opinionated about computers. Looking back, this was driven mostly by “what we had”, “what others had”, and a healthy dose of “defence of self”. It’s the same defensive countermeasures that kick in when anybody with a Playstation argues with anybody that owns an Xbox. It’s been going on for decades.
I am old enough to remember school friends with Spectrums, Commodores, Amstrads, and various other computers all arguing about what was better. I’m also old enough to remember the Atari ST being compared against the Amiga, and the PC being compared against the Mac (remember the “I’m a Mac” ads?).
Time has brought a certain amount of perspective to all of these debates. I now realise that most arguments come down to “I chose this one, and I’m going to die on the hill defending my decision”. It doesn’t really matter what it is.
I’ve now owned pretty much everything I might have once derided. I’ve stood on almost every patch of greener grass. I’ve learned the hard way that nowhere is particularly better than anywhere else.
I guess that makes me a technology agnostic of sorts, which probably annoys the more opinionated enthusiasts far more than it should. It never ceases to amaze me how much effort some people will put into constructing their own hills to die on.
Just for the record, the Amiga was at least 30 years ahead of the curve. I only discovered this 30 years later – because I didn’t have one back in the day. It was better than the Atari ST, the Mac, or the PC, and very few knew – because Commodore couldn’t have found their own ass with both hands with instructions.