Anyway, right out of high school I attended one of those short, three-month, technical schools and learned how to program computers. Part of the studies included learning how to use wires to set up an accounting machine. After the course ended, I landed a programming job at an insurance company in Minneapolis and was soon in love with the constantly changing world of computers. One of the first computers I worked on had a whopping 4K of memory and you loaded your programs via punch cards. Actually, you had to load and run your program a section at a time as even then 4K wasn't enough to get the job done. It even had these dials on front that you turned off and on to help with the execution of the program. And machine code knowledge (in octal) was an absolute necessity. I worked there full time for a year, saving money for college. College was the University of Minnesota where I majored in Mathematics. During my college years I worked part time (mainly programming, of course) and saw computers evolve. I remember that when the company got its first computer with a hard drive we all rejoiced. After college I made a wrong move, and instead of continuing with computers, got a teaching job. My only defense is that during that time jobs were hard to come by and the Math teaching job was just too hard to turn down. That job only lasted the year my contract demanded. After that I married someone from college who was now a Navy officer and relocated to Virginia Beach, and found my way back into computers, this time for a large bank. These were exciting times � new programming languages (COBOL), greater telecommunications capabilities (CICS) and it was great fun. This lasted for a couple years and then out of the blue we were notified that in a couple of weeks we'd be on our way to Japan for a two year stay. So for two years I was lucky enough to be able to immerse myself in another culture. I got a tremendous amount out of those two years but had absolutely no contact with computers. Instead of learning new programming languages, I was studying and getting a teaching certificate in the Japanese art of flower arranging, Ikebana. This is a passion that over the years I've continued to enjoy.

When we got back to the States, after a year in Newport, Rhode Island, we ended up stationed here in Philadelphia where I was finally able to start up with computers again. Needless to say, I could barely remember anything but through a stroke of luck was able to get a good job at a local bank, working on a plum assignment. The luck involved my new boss being Army buddies with my boss at the previous bank in Virginia! So apparently, he'd checked me out before the interview and I had the job from the start (I thought the interview was strange as he didn't ask me any technical questions! I was sure I'd blown it somehow.) The plum assignment was working on the first ATM project in the city � MAC. There were only three of us application programmers and we had a blast. It was good that I had such an intense project as my ex-husband was still assigned to ship duty (this had been going on for seven years now) and he was never really home. The project was a success but the marriage wasn't and we eventually split up. I moved into Center City and continued working on the MAC project. Around this time, personal computers were just beginning to be introduced. I remember hearing about the Apple but opted instead to build my own. On my honeymoon I had gotten the mumps (I know, it should've been an omen), and to fill the time I'd made a small color TV from Heathkit. This involved soldering the circuit boards and wiring everything together, etc. So the thought of building a computer from scratch isn't quite as crazy as it sounds. I picked up a Heathkit personal computer kit and again soldered the circuit boards, etc. I remember it had an 8-inch floppy disk and not much else. Cost me $1200 (this was around 1980) and I sold it a year later for the same amount. This is the point where I stayed on the personal computer route and never made it to the Apple side. Mainly because at work I dealt with IBM all day; it seemed to make sense to stick with them on the personal computer side as well. So over the years I moved from PC to PC to PC to PC in various forms and brands. I do remember looking sort of wistfully at the Apples � they always looked great and the graphics were wonderful. But the big banks that I dealt with (by then I was consulting) required communicating via PCs, so I was stuck.

By the mid-80's I'd taken a position at another local bank and was responsible for a Branch Automation project. Another first for the city, no other bank had automated the teller work, everything was done by hand. By now I had met a great guy and had remarried. For the next couple of decades I stayed in the banking industry but moved up in the IT department. I was the project manager on many large projects (new Branch Automation systems, Customer Information conversions, ATM's�yet again, several LAN projects, and more things than I can remember). Eventually I had responsibility for all of these applications and had a large programming staff working for me to support them. At the end of this time, my bank got bought by another bank, which then got bought by yet another and another and my whole department got transferred to North Carolina. I was offered a job there, but I certainly didn't want to move and so decided to take a year off to see what happened. Long hours and responsibility had worn me down so the year off was very welcome (and I finally got to really clean my basement!). Never actually did go back to working with computers.

Instead, I saw that digital photography had finally reached a level where it was ready for consumers. We did have a fairly new PC but doing the necessary upgrades was a very iffy proposition. Most likely, the new software and hardware it needed would never play together nicely and I'd only get frustrated. Also, this incredible looking flat-panel iMac was simply too inviting to pass up. Plus it came with everything I needed--as part of the operating system. Too good to be true, but my research showed that everything seemed to work as advertised. So I made the leap from PC geek to Mac faithful.

MLMUG has been a great source of information. I joined as soon as I bought the iMac. Every meeting is full of new tidbits and hints and the people I've met have been very welcoming. My husband (who still has to use a PC at work but enjoys the iMac at home) and I went on the MLMUG bus trip to New York for the last MacWorld and he finally got to meet some of the MLMUGers I'd been talking about. He also came to the meeting as my guest when Maria gave her demonstration of iMovie and was really impressed by it all. I've also taken one of Dale's Photoshop classes with Mainline School Night. That class also gave me my first taste of what Macs were like before OS X--certainly not the same. Sometimes I think I may have had an easier job of it, moving from Windows to OS X instead of from an earlier version of Mac OS to OS X. My main effort involved unlearning how to do it the hard way and learning how to do it the easy way!

I've worked with a lot of computers but none as much fun as my Mac. I think I'm sort of like a born-again Christian or reformed smoker in that I tell everyone I run into about my amazing discovery and how they really should repent, see the light, and switch to the Mac.

— Carole Zatz