sonia | Computer history, and desktop accounting software (Reply)

silveradept is posting about their computer history over the month of December, in impressive, loving detail.

I started to write about my history in a comment and it got longer than I expected, so I'm bringing it here.

In the early eighties, my dad taught me to program his TI-58 programmable calculator. No graphics screen, just a one line display. He wrote programs to play Connect-Four, Master Mind, and other games in what was essentially assembler.

In high school I took one Basic class, of which my strongest memory is getting into an argument with the teacher because he thought my P's looked like D's (or vice versa, whatever) and he really wanted to grade me down on a test where the answers had to be P or D. I 100% understood the material (what it was exactly, I've forgotten) and knew I had gotten 100% on the test, so I was angry enough to remember his efforts to discredit me after all these years.

In college, we had a computer lab with CRT terminals to log into three machines, jhuvm, jhuvms, and jhunix, which ran VM, VMS, and unix respectively. This is 1985, early days of the Internet (not web) and we had email, but we had to know which machines talked to which other machines and make a bang path like jhunix!allegra!another!machine. I still remember that allegra talked to many machines, and I was delighted to see it one summer at Bell Labs, sitting on the floor in the corner of someone's office.

Also after a while I had access to Sun workstations, which were a huge step up.

In grad school we also had Sun workstations (on which I played a lot of hextris, as well as working on my big project), and I finally bought my own computer, an Amiga. It was a great computer for logging in to campus remotely, and also to play Larn, a dungeon levels game in color with tiny graphical monsters.

In the mid-nineties I went to a computer trade show, dropped my card in a jar for a drawing, and then strongly disbelieved the phone call that I had won an IBM Thinkpad laptop. They delivered it to me, though! Great little machine, with one of those nubbins of a mouse integrated into the keyboard.

I had a series of laptops after that, one of which got stolen out of my house the week after I bought it. Then a couple of desktops, all running Windows. I really disliked my last desktop, partly because the fan was so noisy. And Windows was just getting more annoying over time.

In 2014 I bought this Macbook Pro, and have been absolutely delighted with it. It's mostly silent! Recently I bought a new Macbook Pro, and have been going through the laborious process of finding out what works and what doesn't, and updating software as needed.

I've been using Quickbooks since I started my business in 1999, and I'm currently running Quickbooks for Mac 2015, which of course won't run on the new machine. I figured I would need to buy the latest version, but it looks like Intuit will no longer sell me their software, only rent it to me for extortionate annual rates, and I don't want to put my financial data online, so my project for the rest of December is to set up and learn Manager, which is free open source accounting software. I would be willing to pay for something I can install on my computer (but only pay once!) but I could only find this open source option.

If anyone has other suggestions for desktop accounting software, let me know!