It took until my first year of college before I could finally afford one of my own, a Macintosh Classic. I pushed that little computer to the limits and two years later replaced it with a Classic II (which my parents still have around somewhere).

Finally, just before my college graduation, I bought a Quadra 660AV. It cost a bundle of money, but you could hook it to a VCR and watch TV on the screen. And you could use it as an answering machine. I used it mostly to make concert posters for friends in the School of Music at college (Belmont University in Nashville, TN) and to do a little freelance Graphic Design. That little mac was recently retired from my parent's basement where it was running a special program that lets the whole house browse the internet at the same time. They now have a shiny new wireless router there instead.

When the Power Computing clones came out around 1996 I decided to part from Apple for a while and in 1997 I bought a Power Computing Power Tower Pro 250. It ran the Mac Operating system and worked just like an Apple. With 256 megabytes of Ram in it, I finally had a serious graphics machine. I used it to do quite a bit of graphic design that year. I upgraded it to a G3 when the original processor died 1 month out of warranty. My wife used it for a while to check e-mail and play games on, but I recently gave it to her sister to do graphics work on. With a USB card and 2-4 gig drives in it that old mac is still kicking.

In January of 1998 I moved back home to Westerville, Ohio to start this consulting business. I had worked for three years in a commercial 4-color print shop and wanted to do something new. I had been fixing friends' computers for free for a few years and knew I could help a lot of people here.

In June of '98 I bought my first PowerBook, a Duo 2300c, from Micro Center. It had never been opened and had been on the back shelf for a few years. Well, it was great for a while, but if you do any serious mobile computing, you will find that the 2300 is a little lacking in speed and expandability (but boy was it light). So in May of '99 I sold the Duo to my parents and bought a PowerBook G3 300. This laptop actually replaced my desktop Mac. Having a Powerbook with me on a job gave me much more flexibility. I could get on the internet from anywhere as long as I could find a phone jack. I had all of Apple hardware spec sheets and take-apart manuals on it (and I could watch DVD movies on a plane ride!).

After that I moved up to a G4 500 (with an upgraded DVD-R drive in it), RTMac real-time card, various external drives and other toys. I also used an iBook 500 for every day stuff like e-mail and on-the-job work. This lightweight baby replaced my beloved PowerBook G3.

A few years later I sold the G4 500 and bought a Dual 867 packed full of drives. I tricked this machine out enough that it's likely that the G5's will come and go before I buy a new tower (keep reading, the G5's came AND went before I replaced it!). It's got a Radeon 9800 card in it, and 4 large hard drives, plus a DVD burner and CD burner.

I also replaced my iBook 500 with an iBook 700 and gave my wife the old one for her birthday (she's since gotten a refurb iBook 1.33ghz), and then once the 15" aluminum Powerbooks came out, I gave the 700 to my parents and bought a 1.25ghz PowerBook G4.

More recently the Powerbook has been replaced by a 17" 2.33 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (along with Bootcamp and Parallels running XP SP2). Also, the G4 has finally been replaced (though it's still around here being used) by a top-of-the-line Mac Pro dual Quad-Core Xeon (that's 8 processors). I needed something that could last me another 5 years, so this seemed like the best solution. And BOY is it fast!

In all, I have been using Apple computers since around 1982 and Macintosh computers specifically since 1984 or 1985. I have been using them to create design since 1992/93 and have been fixing other people's Macs since mid 1997 (I did some consulting work before moving to Ohio in 1998 and I have been tinkering with my own for as long as I can remember). Now, web design, video editing and DVD creation have joined my list of things to do with my Mac, and my newest venture is Keynoteuser.com a site dedicated to Apple's new presentation program.

In May of 1999 I signed up with Apple Computer, Inc to be an Apple Solutions Expert (now the Apple Consultants Network). This gives me access to Apple and Apple's resources. Then in January 2002 we officially incorporated and officially changed the company name to The Peat Group, Inc.

If you have any other questions about my Macintosh knowledge or troubleshooting ability, or have any interest in hiring the Peat Group, inc. to video tape your conference or event, feel free to e-mail me at brian@thepeatgroup.com or call me at (614) 946-8989