www.nickhodge.com

• 1984: Ori­ginal Macin­tosh 128K pur­chased by my Dad from the great Tim Kleemann (thanks, Dad and Tim!). Later upgraded to 512K with the expan­ded ROM. I still have the Sys­tem 1.0/Finder 1.0 disks around somewhere.
• 1986: Macin­tosh Plus: A massive 1Mb of RAM; I trans­por­ted an external 20Mb hard drive from work to home. Remeber pro­gram­ming in C to the MacOS Tool­box (always an adven­ture) on this beastie.
• 1991: Power­book 100 Prob­ably not my smartest pur­chase ever. Sighted it today in stor­age and its lar­ger and heav­ier than I remembered. There is a pic­ture of Liam using this laptop in a high chair when he was 6 months old.
• circa 1991–3: Macin­tosh IIcx: Loaner, not pur­chased. I first viewed and cre­ated Quick­times on this machine, and con­nec­ted to the “inter­net” via dialup/SLIP style con­nec­tions. I remem­ber an Apple sales per­son smug­gling one of these whilst in pre-release into a large cus­tomer in his bag; and pulling it out in a meet­ing. After lug­ging big old Macin­tosh II’s around, there was a shout of joy! You had to be there.
• 1995: Power Macin­tosh 6100: Added one of those DOS cards into the PDS, and run­ning it once or twice. Nice size, but not expand­able enough.
• 1995–8: All sorts of Power­books and Power Macs whilst at Apple. I abso­lutely loved the Power­Book Duos. As a fre­quent trav­el­ler, best sized and weighted laptops, and the 2300 (with PowerPC 603e pro­cessor) was nice-ish.
• 1998–1999: Power­Book G3. Sup­plied by Apple to Adobe, these were a lovely machine. A little heavy, but plenty power­ful to compensate.
• 24^th May 2006: Mac­Book Pro 2.13Ghz, 15 inch After many years in the Windows/Dell world — I’ve decided that its time to return to the MacOS X fold, and catch up with the alpha-web-geeks. Its birth­day present to myself. As its an Intel pro­cessor, its easy to run MacOS and Win­dows applic­a­tions. Just com­pleted install­a­tion of Win­dows XP (for work applic­a­tions) under Par­al­lels Work­sta­tion.

Hav­ing used all sorts of “vir­tual machine” applic­a­tions over the years; SoftPC, Vir­tual PC, the DOS PDS card; so far Par­al­lels is impress­ive. Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion is a nat­ive part of the Intel Core Duo, so com­pet­i­tion in this space over the next year will be inter­est­ing. Even Microsoft are talk­ing this up at Win­HEC this year.