Flashback: 1999

My parents were separated, albeit not divorced, and I lived with my mum. One winter in 1999 I spent a winter school break with my dad. He had worked for a publishing house for many years and decided to start his own publishing house, and his business partner had yet another publishing house specialising in maps. Naturally, all design was done in Macintosh machines.

I had been using Windows for quite a while then. My mum got an IBM PC when I was about 7 or 8 years old. It ran DOS and Windows 3.11. It was rather boring, there was a few games I enjoyed, but not many as they were hard to come by and expensive. We had an upgrade eventually, and Windows 95. That machine stayed with us for half a decade. In 1996 I used the internet for the first time. I remember sending my first e-mail to my dad and my mum explaining that it was cheaper than making a phone call to my grandma.

We used Netscape to browse the web. I didn't see anything interesting about it, so my experience was limited.

But in 1999 I got my hands on a Power Mac. And it was gorgeous. Fast and elegant. I believe now it was a Power Macintosh 6200, branded "Performa". It had a zip drive and Mac OS 8.5. It had a game, which I now think was Valkyrie (aka Cobra Strike) or maybe A-10 Cuba. I need to double check that. I remembered using a similar computer when I was very small. It was familiar and fascinating.

That week sealed my interest in the Macintosh. I started gathering information on that computer and learning all about it. 1999 was the year I felt comfortable with the English language for the first time. Not fluent by any standards, but able to translate and interpret most text.