The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an essay by a Muslim woman in which she muses on the parallels between her religion and her computing platform.
The Mac operating system was created from scratch with the goal of being simple. When you turn a Mac on, the desktop is not an artificial environment created to navigate through DOS but is, in fact, the actual environment. Muslims are encouraged by the Koran to look at the world with curiosity and wonder, not to be afraid of scientific discovery. God's creations are "signs" to us of his design, which God wants us to explore and theorize about. The Koran liberates us to ask, "Why?" This accessibility to God is a major attraction for many Muslim converts. Being Muslim, and also being a Mac user, is empowering because both put me in control.
Somewhat related: she was apparently considering law school at the same time I was in graduate school, and tells a story about how the professor was distributing class materials on disk and asked who would need this in Mac format. When a quarter of the class raised their hands, he gave a surprised chuckle. This was "a time before downloading off the Internet became easy," she says.
Well, at my school in 1997, downloading off the Internet was quite easy! In fact, wasn't 1997 the year of the dot-com takeoff? We kept being told to order our books on Amazon.com (which, of course, kept running out of the somewhat obscure texts because nobody had told them they'd be needed — and that's why campus bookstores still exist, people!) and our course syllabi were all put on the web (as well as some of our reading assignments).
What we didn't have was Mac support. The high-tech computer lab came courtesy of some Silicon Valley company, but it wasn't Apple, and the lab staff hated having to support the token Macintosh or two that were there. So that's how I learned to use (though not love) Windows... I wonder if things have changed now that Apple upgraded to OS X.
