I’m a PC guy these days. That’s entirely a result of work-related compatibility issues and, since my retirement, budget and… well inertia I suppose.
But recent events got me reminiscing about my own introduction to personal computing. I was not a hugely early adapter to home computing, other than a brief foray into the world of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a (a Commodore 64 contemporary I think)… but somewhere around the mid 90’s I discovered digital MIDI-based musical instruments, particularly drums and keyboards. Now I could play drums in an apartment! Exciting stuff for a guy who’d sold his soul drum kit in 1977 to go to computer programming school…
Anyway, I soon reached the limits of the built-in sequencer on my TD-7 drum unit, and I asked the guy at Saved By Technology, where I bought the MIDI gear, to advise me on a bigger sequencer. He suggested I just buy a computer, or I’d soon be frustrated by the inherent limitations of any hardware-based sequencer.
So I asked around amongst my colleagues, mainframe computer types like me: “Mac or PC?”
This would be somewhere around Win 95 / OS 7.1 era… Lots of hoopla about Win95… The few people at work with PC’s (most of us were on so-called “dumb terminals” ) were still on Win 3.1. I remember finding it quite interesting that while 2 out of 3 recommended the PC, anyone who had used both types would recommend the Mac. Mind you, none of them were doing MIDI sequencing, so in the end, the Saved By Technology guy’s recommendation carried the most weight, and soon I had my very own Power Mac 7100.
Almost all of what would eventually become my first (and probably only) officially-released CD was written and recorded within a few months of getting up and running on that machine, and getting my gear working with it.
While the whole Mac or PC debate has these days become tiresome and about as interesting as “Coke vs Pepsi”, I did go through a period of Mac evangelism in the Nineties, as a result of my early success and enthusiasm on that platform.
So yeah, thank you Steve Jobs.
related post: Gravitas Studio Setup
