Northern Vermont Macintosh
User Group

I am David "Doc" Gordon, 52 years old. I live in Chelsea, and operate several businesses, the primary of which is Windswept Productions www.windprod.com, a Mac-based shop. WP's services include web and print design, digital imaging, retouching, and products derived therefrom, digital audio recording, editing, and mastering, Mac and Mac systems consulting, troubleshooting, and repair, along with a few related fields and products. I am also a working composer and musician, which I sort of group under the WP umbrella for the sake of convenience. Another business, which I will soon be closing down, has for the past 8+ years been a small fitness center, which unwisely was located in Chelsea.

My first exposure to computers was a Univac mainframe in a manufacturing plant, which I humbly served as an operator during that company's changeover from an IBM system (360, I think), to the Univac. It took up a huge climate-controlled room, and featured three or four refrigerator-sized hard drives (all of which would be lost on the average Performa drive) and the obligatory array of tape drives...

My first exposure to "Personal Computing" was through a programmer friend of mine in Boston circa 1982 or so, when he proudly showed me how he could communicate with fellow programmers in India...

My first exposure to Apple was the original Mac in 1984, which immediately captivated me. I bought my first Mac, a Quadra 950, when they'd been out a few months, primarily to develop a music studio. I loaded Photoshop, with which I'd become very familiar in the workplace, and it became my chief source of income from that point on.

Currently I am running a DP G5 (primarily for the studio), 2G RAM so far, some 400+ GB storage (plus a few Firewire drives for archiving), and a complement of MOTU DAW cards, UAD DSP cards, and the like. My other production machine is a DP G4, which is now devoted entirely to imaging and design. I also use a beige G3 (now upgraded to G4) as a platform for a Korg OASYS synth card as part of the studio. At home I have a disassembled 9500 (upgraded to G4) that will be the guinea pig in my attempt to get OSX to run on legacy hardware, or will be our second home unit. I also have a Powerbook 3400c (ack) and my old Quadra, which I cannot bear to let go. It's an old house, and a doorstop always comes in handy.

I love OSX, now that MOST of the software and drivers have been brought up to speed.

I use the Macromedia suite, although mostly Dreamweaver; the Adobe Creative Suite (pretty much all of it daily except for GoLive), the MS Office group (in order to communicate with much of the business world), Appleworks, BBEdit, Roxio Toast Titanium, MYOB and Quicken, and a slew of graphics and publishing apps that do specific things that need doing. I use Silverfast scanning software for my Epson, and a few other things which escape me right now. I also love playing around in Bryce, but since it was orphaned it's not as Panther-friendly as I'd hoped.

In my DAW world I rely mainly on MOTU's Digital Performer with an array of third-party plugs, Reason, the OASYS software, the UAD Powered Plugins, Spark XL, Peak, and another group of "specific-purposed" apps that help my workflow.

My main maintenance tool has always been Diskwarrior (HATE Norton!), but have been favorably impressed with TechTool Pro 4. Some very nice features.

I used to do Photoshop seminars.... about three versions ago! I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as I'd like to be with the current version: like most people, I use what I need and no longer have time to explore... I'd love to make a DAW presentation, but the rig ain't too mobile.

Of course

Yes