Apple sent some machines a long time ago to my lab. Try them, they said. They were damn seductive and had populist agendas going for them. They combined elements of open source, Microsoft Office, and a slick look-and-feel. They tasted of Unix, and I've been using Unix since 1979. Mostly, to borrow a highly overused phrase, it just worked. That was at Mac OS X (10.0), which had just changed over from a long stretch of OS9. There was even a bundled OS9 compatibility mode for legacy software.

Mac OS then moved onto Intel hardware in a move that surprised many. Early software allowed Windows to work on it in virtual machines -- or by a dual-boot arrangement. If your business was IT, one machine could cover both operating systems, Mac and Windows. Yes, you had to buy the Windows licenses, but it was one machine.

Support for Apple software among major vendors was at the time, minimal, because of Apple's prior use of the PPC processor. Handily Apple included a processor instruction translation capability that allowed Intel and PPC software to execute concurrently in the same machine; that capability was lost at Mac OS 10.6.

No one wanted the expense of supporting two platforms when sales of Apples were small. Now, Apple is on a somewhat level playing field with Microsoft in terms of mainstream software support. For me, however, it was time to change.