Parenthetically, the new iMac

I have done little coding this week, partly owing to taking more than a full day to complete the installation of a new computer:

This 27-inch "retina" iMac is sitting on a wall-mounted desk unit that has been the "office" section of the family bedroom since the 1980s. I got to wondering what other computers it has formerly supported. Here's the list as best as I can put it together:

• An S-100 bus CP/M system with a home-assembled Heath/Zenith Z-19 monitor
• A Zenith Z-89 CP/M system
• A Mac SE/30
• A Macintosh IIci with Radius Pivot monitor
• A Power Macintosh (Blue and White)—can't remember what monitor that used
• A Mac Pro with an Apple Cinema Display

I've owned other machines, such as a series of PCs while I was writing books about them, several different Mac portables, at one point even an Apple II with a Z80 CP/M card in it. But the ones listed above were the ones that sat on this office desk and got serious use for multiple years each.

The Mac Pro, bought within a month of its announcement in 2006, served the longest of any, more than eight years. It came with OS X 10.4 "Leopard" installed, shortly upgraded to 10.5 "Tiger", then to 10.6 "Snow Leopard".

Snow Leopard was a splendid OS, and I used it for nearly three years before I reluctantly "upgraded" (an upgrade it was not) to Lion. That was the end of the line, because this early-model machine had a 32-bit BIOS and was cut off from the genuine upgrade to 10.7 "Mountain Lion".

I kept the machine for two more years as it fell farther and farther off the software state of the art, simply because Apple didn't offer an adequate replacement. The new "canister" Mac Pro didn't interest me because I was tired of piecing systems together out of components. I didn't want to have to figure out what kind of external disk to buy for it, and anyway the current Apple monitors were clearly lagging technologically. Sooner or later, I was sure, Apple would have to produce a nice, tidy all-in-one iMac with a big screen with "retina" pixel density. When they fiiiiiinally announced one, I jumped—just as I had leapt onto the Mac Pro in 2006 to replace the aging Blue and White. (I hope I don't find out in five years that I should have waited six months for a crucial upgrade, just as I would have been better off waiting six months for a Mac Pro with a 64-bit BIOS!)

"Installing" a new computer is more about housekeeping than computers. I pulled out everything from this corner of the room, disturbing dust-bunnies that had been accumulating since the Mac Pro was new. An armload of old, incompatible software CDs and manuals went in the trash. It took several hours to do the general housecleaning of the area and make it all fresh and neat.

So far, the iMac looks like a keeper. The "magic" mouse is slick: no cord, and I can scroll by gently caressing its back with my middle finger. I also got the bluetooth track-pad visible in the picture, and I alternate between that and the mouse. Each is comfortable. The display is excellent, but there's a tiny drawback to such a large one. The Mac OS menu bar is always in the upper left of the screen. When an app's main window is in the center or to the right, and I want to click on the File or Edit menu, it's a loooong way off to the side. I feel like a tennis spectator swiveling my head from left to right. (Finally, a reason to put the menu bar on the app window instead of the screen-top.)

The silver box at the lower left is a NewerTech "mini-stack" with a 2TB hard drive and a Blu-Ray burner. Before retiring the Mac Pro I used Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate its two drives onto this drive, so every file and app I had accumulated before is still accessible (some of those files date to the 1980s...). Actually the Apple Migration Assistant has become really slick. I just had to give it the password to the household Time Capsule and it simply took over the Time Capsule backup of the Mac Pro and used it to get almost everything I wanted.

I spent some hours installing the latest Python 2 using "brew", to supersede the Apple one, and Python 3.4 from the Mac distribution at Python.org. I installed Wing IDE and spent a little time selecting larger fonts so I could read my code while sitting a couple of feet from the screen. I haven't installed Py/Qt yet; I want to wait for Qt5.4 and the matching PyQt. In the meantime I will get back to developing on my laptop. But by the end of the month I expect I'll be doing most of my development work on the iMac, sitting up at the same desktop where I did PPQT version one and several books.