OPML HowTo's: HowTo: The Macintosh will be 25 on 1/24/09
Dave A
· 1 year ago
My Mom was a teacher and got an "Apple for the Teacher" discount, so we ended up upgrading to Mac from an Apple //c and had one of the first Macs in town. I moved up to a "Fat Mac" 512k, to an overclocked Mac IIsi (those could go from 20mhz to 25mhz with a simple clock crystal change!), then a Centris 650, a BlackBird notebook, and many more. But I'm glad I got started right back in 1984!
Marc, yes I remember that -- they mostly were covering people who worked at Apple, but the Mac is much larger than Apple. I'm interested in other people whose stories might not be so well-told.
StarwindE
· 1 year ago
My "ex" was selling computers at the time and brought home one of the first 128K machines that came in to the store. It was love at first byte!
Whole new worlds opened up... remembering chat rooms at Compuserve (hello to former fellow MAUG-ers from the "DragonLady!"), early MacWorld events in San Fran and Boston, eWorld... if it weren't for that first Mac, I'd never have met my dearly loved husband (thanks TalkCity!) and so many other great folks nor would I be a community manager today.
25 years later and I'm still a Mac-aholic, with a MacBook Pro and iMac living on my desk.
Bryan McCormick
· 1 year ago
I was in college in 1984, back in Toronto. My computer then was a very fussy Apple II. It was certainly okay and was a step up for the work I was doing on a typewriter and note cards, but not enough of a step. I was much more the intuitive/picture type, not an abstractionist. Pure text and few mnemonics made the Apple II experience less than special. It was like getting excited about a hammer.
Soon after the original Mac launch, it showed up in Toronto in a shop window on Queen Street. There was I recall just one store selling it. My friend Rob and I went in to see it. I remember playing with MacPaint, checking out how the system worked. I was hooked. I HAD to have this now!. This was a revolution I had to be part of. Then, I looked at the price tag. "Boom". The dream was over. As a student it was far out of my reach. But it had already begun to work on me. All the more so after having to turn back to the Apple II which from then on seemed like being relegated to the Gulag.
I could not have imagined that only 4 years later I would be in the US working as a programmer developing Mac software for a start-up, leaving my career as an art historian in the dust. But that is exactly what happened. And that was just the start.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Mac changed my life. From the first moment, it was a transforming experience that would never have happened had we stayed in any of the DOS land flavors. It is very tough to get this across to people today. It wasn't just that it was a new and better toy. Really, on some level it was like seeing a technology from a future culture that somehow had just magically dropped into our laps. A technology that just made instantly clear sense and from which it was clear the world would be a better and very different place thereafter.
To me, everything that has come down the pike since then has been evolution, not revolution. It has been a very long time since I gave thanks for that. But wow, how different my life would have been otherwise. And I know in my heart, a sadly diminished one. Thank you Mac!
I remember using one of the first Macs at the Observatory classroom of the Integrated Science Program at Northwestern University. I remember copying stacks of floppy disks to move stuff around. I remember the sad day I went to work for a software and had to give up the Mac since what we made didn't run there. :-(
tempo
· 1 year ago
I was twelve at the time, and had seen the '1984' ad during the Super Bowl. I waited in line in front of Computerland (an early computer retailer) on the January 24th to get a glimpse of it. I had a TRS-80, so knew a bit about computers, but I had never seen anything like this before. The mouse was a revelation. I especially remember MacPaint, and this mirror feature that created a kaleidoscopic effect when you made pictures by moving around this pointing device.
I begged my parents to get it, and since it was morning in America, they somehow found the $2500 to buy this 128k Mac with no hard drive (not that we knew better at the time). My friends whose parents worked at Wang or IBM laughed at me because 'that thing has no power.' My uncle grilled me on what the hell I thought was going to do with this overpriced toy.
That year I started making newspapers with MacPaint, MacWrite and pasteup boards. I'd bring them down to the offset printer who would make me a few hundred of these carefully typeset pages. They look awful by today's standards, but the printers then were amazed by the variety of fonts, and the graphics I would draw pixel by pixel. They were used to seeing pages typed out on IBM Selectrics.
I went on to do desktop publishing at an independent publisher out of college, and then co-found a series of Internet startups. I thank the Mac for fusing both sides of my brain and fueling a career in an area that is changing the world.
harrym
· 1 year ago
OK, Dave. Two quick stories about the birth of the Mac. First, Macworld magazine was also launched that day, edited by my friend the late Andrew Fluegelman. Andrew came back from the meeting where he had showed Steve the first production copy of the magazine, which we did in on very rich paper and oversized, and told me that Steve had given him an amazing compliment: "That's the best f!#@$ing thing I've ever seen"
Second story is about that 1984 ad. You may have heard this, but Chiat Day wanted to enter the ad in the Clios which meant it would have had to run during 1983, but obviously that would have blown the secret of the Mac. So what they did was to run it in the middle of the night on a station that usually signed off at midnight somewhere in Montana. Which always made me wonder if there wasn't some guy asleep on the couch with the TV still on, who was awakened by the sound, saw the 1984 commercial and then the screen goes back to snow and white noise.
Pablo Moroe
· 1 year ago
I was born 1 month and half so it's impossible to remember. What I remember with joy, it was my first time on a computer, and that computer was a Macintosh. 20 years later, I feel again that feeling. Thanks a lot, Mac :)
pdfalcon
· 1 year ago
Early in 1984 I was at an Apple Developers Conference in Sydney Australia and met my first Mac - is that close enough to the origin to be interesting? I owned a Lisa at the time - helped produce Adelaide's first couple of Lisa applications. My real job then, though, had been producing a rather well engineered small business accounting package for the Apple III- until Apple canned the Apple III to encourage Mac sales later in 1984.
scaganoff
· 1 year ago
When the Macintosh first cam out I was a graduate student in Astronomy. Our job was to turn photons into paper. Billions of photons traveling from the edge of the universe and the begining of time would land splat on our detectors and be processed into endless shelves of journals lining the library walls - Astrophysical Journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society et al.
One day a harbinger of change showed up in the computer room in the form of a small beige box, right next to our VAX - read the rest of the story on my blog
I was eight years old when the Mac came out. My friend and I learned that the our computer store in Madison (i think it was called Blue Lakes Computers) had a Mac. We rode our bikes down University Avenue forever to get there. Spent a couple hours playing around with the incredible new computer. My Mom found out what we'd done, and we got in deep shit for riding our bikes so far and on such a busy street, but it was worth it!
scott crawford
· 1 year ago
Yowza! I was a still relatively young writer who'd given up typewriters with the discovery of the Wang WP system. Then I started dabbling with the Vic20 for fun and soon after picked up a Kaypro as my weapon of choice. I do mean weapon. At 28 lbs, and with hard steel corners, I could do some serious damage when it came time to schlep that thing down a narrow airplane aisle and hoist it into the overhead. But, ahhhhhh, the lovely sound it made on landing, when the box would slide forward at velocity and slam into the adjoining compartment wall. Still, with dual floppies and a great keyboard, it was a workhorse that let me get the job done.
But then the Mac came along and it was a stunning leap. I was skeptical of the too-simple-by-half interface initially. I got over it. I fell in love.
Steven Levy
· 1 year ago
The day I saw the Mac -- a few weeks before it came out, while working on a story for Rolling Stone -- I knew that my computing life would be changed. I also met people who are good friends to this day. And found the subject for a book, a column in Macworld, and zillions of more articles, most recently one that marks the anniversary (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-01/...) If you follow the link, you'll see a nice photograph of my first Mac.
Joel Bishop
· 1 year ago
I still have my first mac classic. Have owned dozens since, but this one holds a fond place in my heart. I was so tempted to make it into an aquarium, or terrarium but chose to keep her whole and in tact on the shelf. $2,500 was a lot of money in 1984.
gbailey
· 1 year ago
Funny, kept planning to do the same... Finally just tossed it...
leolaporte
· 1 year ago
I became a computer buff in the late 70s, first with Atari, then C/PM machines. I bought one of the first IBM-PC clones, an Eagle PC, in '83. I remember seeing the Lisa around that time and wanting one very badly, but at $10,000 they were way beyond the means of a midday DJ at KLOK-AM in San Jose (aka me). When the Macintosh came out I was really excited but it was still pretty expensive. It took me two months of yearning before I could bring myself to go into the San Francisco Macy's, plunk down my Macy's credit card, and spend $2,500 on my first Mac. It probably took me several years to pay off that Mac, but I never looked back. Which is funny, because that first 128K Mac was a real pain to use. I still remember the several hundred disk swaps it would take to copy a single floppy.
bigmikeh1965
· 1 year ago
I walked into a mac store in havertown, pa at the manoa shopping center, moved the mouse around the screen and didn't like it. i was using a trs-80 model 3 at the time. i didn't touch another one again until os x came out, have been hooked ever since.
Cate
· 1 year ago
I had a Mac Classic. I'm glad I don't anymore haha, No I mean I'm glad I can run video's, have a colour GUI, and do all the things I do now, All I remember about the Classic is that it was more fun than the PC I had at the time,
jaimef
· 1 year ago
I still remember (prior to the Macintosh) a video of Apple employees and execs dancing around to a catchy tune with the lyrics "Apple II forever and ever." Little did they know....
Joseph F
· 1 year ago
I learn to program on my Apple IIc, and it was one of the best platforms at the time. But the Mac change my perspective on programming. My first Mac was a fat mac I love the all in one package making is a primary computer of my home. I latter upgraded to my Mac IIx the real power machine with my student discount. My latest two are the Black Mac Book upgraded to 4GB of ram used for my hacking platform, and my brand new uni-body mac book pro.
Life is good.
Rob Lamb
· 1 year ago
God bless Mimi, my grandmother, who forked over $6K to buy a brand new MacIIFX system. It was the late 80's and I was still in school. It helped me develop skills in photo editing, layout design, illustration, 3D modeling, video editing, and music composition. My first Mac helped me get jobs in advertising, television, and the web. It was a workhorse for 10 years and was the most valuable computer I've ever owned.
Nightstar
· 1 year ago
Got the mac with printer. Was so far ahead of the PC... And sill is!
Was so new. Had uses a SWTP with cross compiler to make software for it and final got mainstay to do it native on the Mac.
Hate to think of the computering world without this mega milestone!
FogartyFOTO
· 1 year ago
My first Mac is my iPhone. Best phone & best micro computer Ive ever owned. Yet 90% of traffic to my blog is Windows / Firefox.
SportEquip
· 1 year ago
My father was an innovator on this one. Bought the original 128k Mac, later got the huge update to 512k presumably breaking the warranty. Has the signatures on the inside of the case. I still have it, although the monitor went out. I also have a Duo laptop.
Still remember the incredible feeling of using a mouse to control the screen and also experiencing the first WYSIWYG environment. It's actually hard to explain that the MS-Dos machines were primarily green text on black screen with only one style of text displayable. The changes in print had to be controlled with html like prompts inside the text line and changes in the font were controlled by the built in font sets in the printer itself. Crazy.
Trying to explain that the first real hard drives were like 5MB and my first built-in HD was 20MB with an external 40MB on an SE is laughable to current generation users. One terabyte is how much bigger? A couple photos from a digital camera can be 20 MB. My 30-60 minute audio podcasts for The Tennis Podcast are over 20MB.
The limitations of the original Mac could in no way take away the experience that it gave. My only regret is that Apple did not find a way to make it's product acceptable to the business world earlier. Oh, and that Apple didn't win the suit against Microsoft for completely copying the whole finder concept. Recycle, hmm.
There hasn't been one computer innovation since that has been as dramatic as the Macintosh.
longterm
· 1 year ago
My first computer was a Commodore 64 that I bought for $175 at a local discount store. I got on Compuserve, was using email, joined a few forums, and was blazing at 300 baud.
I was walking through a mall one afternoon in 1984 when I saw the Macintosh for the first time; it was sitting on a pedestal at the entrance to a computer store. I walked up to it, stared at the strange little box for a few seconds, watched the demo. Within a few weeks I got my hands on one for the first time, when a friend called me over to see his new Mac.
I didn't get my own Mac until the Mac Plus was released. Going from a Commodore 64 with 32K of RAM, to the Mac with 1MB of RAM, was a profound experience. As a professional musician, I was using the C64 to record MIDI; 1984 was the first year that MIDI hit the music scene, and I was recording jingles with it within the first year. To go to the Mac, where I had unlimited recording tracks and this wild new interface, was amazing for me.
I think the first Mac OS I used was System 2.1, but it's hard to remember. I sold that first Mac Plus to a friend for $1200, and last year he gave it back to me, complete with floppies that contain Mac OS 7.
I added a hard drive to the Mac Plus; it was a Jasmine $1300, 80 MB drive. What a beauty that was! Then I added another MB of RAM by opening the box and putting in a circuit board and a jumper... I was high-tech. I remember when Quickeys was announced, used to use DiskTop all the time (remember it?), remember all the early app-switchers that were released.
Twenty-five years later, I own a hosting company and host websites and FileMaker databases, all on Macs; I have a network of 30 Macs of all stripes--G5s, Xserves, a couple of old G4s that are soon to be retired.
John
· 1 year ago
Hey Dave, I just saw Leo's tweet about this site. Coincidentally, I just wrote my first blog post last night, in part to celebrate the Macintosh at 25: http://ackvt.com
Robertv
· 1 year ago
I remember my first Mac contact back in High School, 1979 or so. An Apple 2. Bloody awful.
I've never been an Apple fan by any means. I will use one if required to, but Windows all the way for me.
Happy 25th.
Mark Grennan
· 1 year ago
My first computer was a 4004 and I owned Apple][ serial number 8??. I worked on the CP/M operating system for Vector Graphics (S100) and remember everything being open now revered to as OpenSource. You could view the source on everything from mainframes to the apple ][. Then Apple closed everything with the Macintosh. There was this great book for DOS (apple DOS 3.3) call Beneath Apple DOS that listed the entire source to the operating system. Several of my friends and I where so upset that you had to buy these really expensive manuals to even learn how to used the Macintosh ROMs we worked together through CompuServe to de-compile the ROMs and document what they did. We published our work as a de-compiler and all of our comments read to merge together thus no copyright infringement.
willterminus
· 1 year ago
I was born into a world with Macs in 1993. My father used it for audio and music editing and other things of corse. When I was born we had one of the classic macs but it died and I can barely remember it. We replaced it with a power mac 7200 that would latter become my first computer a few years down the road. I played mostly games on it from humongos entertainment. But one mac led to another and the rest is history. This was sent from an iPod Touch
John Durham
· 1 year ago
Apple had a program for teachers that would let you use the Macintosh for one month if you agreed to use the different programs and write a review. I remember going through the programs and writing the reviews, then printing a map from the printer that was included so that an Apple Rep could come and pick up the computer and printer at my school site. I can remember the day that the Apple Rep came to our school, it was a sad day for the students and myself.
Lisa H
· 1 year ago
I remember hating every computer I'd had to use pre-Mac; I was terrified of dropping punch cards, and couldn't see the use in typing lines of code just to get that black screen to say 'hello world.' But then there were the Lisas, and I thought it would be cool to have a computer with the same name as me... until I found out how much they cost. That wasn't going to happen. But the Macs... the Macintoshes had me hooked at their arrival; our school got one and I adored it. Finally computers seemed 'right' to me. That was when I knew that computers would be an integral part of my future, and have been using Macs (with the occasional splash of Amiga) ever since. I helped organize and manage the local leg of the Mac Road Show in 97, and worked (in addition to my 'day job') as a part-time rep for Apple for 5 years (doing product launches and such), then as a part-time Apple Specialist for 2 years. I became known as 'the Apple Chick.' People thought I was crazy when I said computers would become like TVs, that they'd have music and video on them, that one day everyone would be able to do video work on their systems. The computer video workflow I did at the time was expensive, slow, and impractical, so no one thought it could evolve. But I had seen how computers evolved into Macs, and that inspired me to see their potential... and it still does.
firehazrd
· 1 year ago
I was 8 years old playing an all text game (hitchhikers guide to the galaxy?) on my dad's hand me down homemade apple2 with a green monochrome monitor while he set up the new "mac".
Tom Kilbride
· 1 year ago
It took me almost twenty years to buy my first Mac, but when I saw the original, I thought it was like watching someone do magic.
Dr. Mark Sukoenig
· 1 year ago
My first Mac wasn't a Mac. I kept all my records in my Encino, CA optometry practice with an Apple II and then an Apple IIe. I remember buying a hard drive for about eleven hundred dollars that was something like ten K!!! I sure had a lot of those big floppy discs before I went to the little ones that were in plastic shells with metal sliding access doors.
Jonathan Hall
· 1 year ago
My first mac was earlier this year, having grown up a PC man all my life
analogy
· 1 year ago
my first mac was a performa 550 my dad bought me after having been estranged from me for 10 years. i didn't really understand how it worked until i turned on virtual memory to play a demo of spectre vr that came on a cd-rom bundled with a magazine. when the machine refused to budge thereafter, i had to submit to it's whim just to flip a radio button and restart. later the same year i fucked up my 'system' file in resedit and needed to call apple to restore from a bundle of cd-roms they sent me. eventually i got my parents to buy me system 7.5 and got on america online where i hung out in a private room called 'macfilez' where users mass-mailed each other illegal fucking pirated software. i started collecting computers and ended up with two on my desk. a really cool teacher helped me steal an lc 5200/75 from the high school and i ran a hotline server with it for years. i eventually got netbsd running on the 550 but the motherboard died because i plugged in adb peripherals without powering down the machine. the thing stayed in my closet until a month later, when i found another 550 at the swap meet for $15 and swapped the motherboards.
eventually i grew up and moved far away from my parents, but my love for macs never wavered. i have a macbookpro, a mac mini and a clamshell ibook for playing retro games on. macs taught me to be a leet haxor.
Ronald Aguirre
· 1 year ago
I waited a year to get my first Mac out of necessity (it was EXPENSIVE). I bought a 512K Mac and later upgraded to a Mac Classic. I never considered myself to have an ounce of creativity until Mac unlocked my "creative" doors for me.
I've owned several Macs since then. Just bought a new MacBook, and have an iMac at home and at work. My kids have been raised on Macs and groan insufferably when they are forced to deal with PCs.
Bob Cozzi
· 1 year ago
I was sitting in a board room at Tellabs Inc while they were considering adding Lisa to their IBM System/38 infrastructure. The engineers of all people, wanted to give the Mac a try, while the Exec's thought Lisa was the solution. They're all using Macs (as well as the IBM iSeries) today. Just like Apple does. :)
Hazelrigg
· 1 year ago
The first time I used a Mac was in 1989. I worked in a small design studio in Red Bank, NJ. They had 1 Mac and 1 PC. That's where I learn Aldus Illustrator 88. I'm pretty sure the Mac I worked on was a 11cx
The first Mac I owned was a 7600. I got it for a song due to a type-o in a retail ad. Computer City guaranteed they would meet or beat any competitors price. it was 1997 and I saved $1,200.00
Mike Kelly
· 1 year ago
I saw my 128 Mac in the window of a office supply store in Tillamook, Oregon where I was stationed as a field geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey during the summer of 1994. I'm sure it was the only computer west of Portland. I think I paid 3k for the Mac and an Imagewriter. It set the tone for all my work in geoscience visualization for at least a decade. Here is a kick, once I got the Mac back to Menlo Park, I was approached by a secretive techy guy at USGS, who offered to upgrade me to 512K. In a clandestine meeting after hours deep in the basement of the Western Regional Geology Building, I handed over my Mac and 200 bucks. He took it to his Apple connection somewhere in Cupertino who I didn't get to meet. Next day I had the most powerful Mac not available! Today I have new PBPro which I'm using to write undergraduate geoscience textbooks.
Fast Eddy
· 1 year ago
I wonder who that Apple person was who upgraded your 128 Mac before Apple was releasing that version? My guess is they would have been fired fast if they were caught. Cool story! Maybe it was Schiller.
Mike Kelly
· 1 year ago
Not sure who the person at Apple was. Not Schiller, but maybe Andy. Those were interesting times! BTW - I noticed I said 1994 in my story when I meant of course 1984, and i can't stop calling it a Powerbook. Not sure why but damn it rips!
Luanne Stevenson
· 1 year ago
I remember I along with my now business partner and husband were working at PRC in Mclean, VA. We got 512 macs with MacDraw and MacWrite on them! We thought they were the greatest things! Can you imagine! 512K! I have seen them grow since the beginning! (ok...dating my self....) Once you go Mac you never go back!
yod9
· 1 year ago
Started learning computers on an Apple ][e in 1986. VLIN and HLIN are now firmly etched into my brain. I did not return to the Apple fray until 1991 learning computer design in college. i was hooked on Mac from that moment on. I bought my first Mac in 1995 with the Powewrbook 165c. I still miss that rugged, slow laptop. Did I mention is was slow? Anyway, learning Photoshop 3 was a wonderful experience (I still have the floppies for it) and the trackball was a great thing to have a laptop that I still wish was an option to this day. My favorite game was Burning Monkey Solitaire.
I now own 7 Macs from various periods, 4 iPods and 2 Apple NEWTONS! I am lost in a sea of Mac and loving it.
ForensicCPA
· 1 year ago
I am a CPA and in 1983 was a sole practitioner. I went to a Xerox retail store and was torn between an Apple IIc and a Xerox CP/M box. Apple had 5 1/2" dual drives and the Xerox had 8" drives. Lovely green monitors for both. Epson dot matrix or Apple thermal printers. Decided on the Apple with an 8" monitor, the dual drives and thermal printer. Cost was about $4,000, including a copy of VisiCalc. I was in heaven. Then I realized that I had to spend more money so I bought my first card and a bunch of chips (to install myself) to I think 128K of RAM. And then I saw WordStar and had to have it, so off I went for a CP/M card and WordStar (around $300 by itself). I continued all sorts of surgeries on my Apple until I was forced by professional needs to move to an IBM PC and Lotus Symphony in 1985. Loved my Apple, hated putting it aside and bought the first Mac that was available - extraordinary paperweight. No more Macs until two years ago - now my choice for personal computing outside of the office (I now have three MacBooks - MBP, MBA and MacBook08. I'm thrilled.
leehinde
· 1 year ago
In November 1984 Apple was running a promotion - "Test Drive a Mac". You could go into an Apple store and borrow a computer for over night to, well, test drive it. Being a clever lad, I arranged my pick-up for a Saturday night, so I had Sunday, when the store was closed, to play too. Consistent with Apple resellers everywhere, they forgot to pack the manuals. The fact I could figure it out was amazing to me. Apple later made a commercial joking about the difference in the size of the Mac manual compared to a PC manual set.
I still remember figuring out how to enter a formula in Multiplan. Type an '=' and then CLICK IN THE CELLS YOU WANT TO ADD! Holy cow. And MacPaint!
So, the first purchase was a 128 Mac (even though the 512 was shipping or was imminent, I forget which). An ImageWriter, a case. Multiplan/Chart and OverVue (now Panorama) and an external floppy drive.
So, the fallout from falling in love with a computer?
I was working for a tax-funded non-profit at the time and had to appeal to a board of elected officials to get the money for the computer. One of the members, a city councilman from Roseville was also a Mac fan and this public hearing turned into a conversation as we talked about the wonder that was Mac and the programs that were pending and MacPaint! That guy became a ringer for me on the board and was key to the future success of the organization I ran.
My work in OverVue led to working in Helix and then in 4th Dimension. In 1990, I left the non-profit world and began a database and Mac consulting business that continues (albeit in a different form) today. Sadly, the original Mac (which was still around) belonged to the non-profit and had to stay there. The first Mac I bought with my own money was an SE/30.
Kathryn
· 1 year ago
Oh. My! Helix (and Double Helix and Helix Express). We still have a few of those databases hanging around on machines running 10.4. Once we go all Leopard, these will all die. So sad. We moved to FileMaker.
Joe Colletti
· 1 year ago
I remember when the Lisa was introduced the year before the Mac. It was amazing, and I knew I had to have one. I would hang around in a local computer store playing with as often as I could until the owner threw me out of the store. Then the Mac came out in 1984, and it was only $2500! But, naturally, I didn't have any money. So, I started saving for about a year. By thy time I had the money, the 512k mac was out. I bought my first Mac in 1985, along with an Apple dot matrix printer, at the A&S Department sore in Huntington, NY. It was quite a step up from my Commodore 64. I would have to say that the Mac has had a bigger effect on my life than any other single prodduct in my lifetime.
Steve Jobs
· 1 year ago
I never had a Mac, and I never will have a Mac.
JT Ray
· 1 year ago
My first Mac was a 17" iMac purchased in November 2006. Here is the post I made http://jtsblog.com/got-a-mac. Have since purchased a MacBook as well as a number of iPods.
Tim
· 1 year ago
My neighbor in college had a massively tricked up 512. What a wonder that machine was. I loved to write 5 page papers on that thing and then tweak the margins to get that last page.
I had always wanted a Mac and never could get one, until early 1995 when Sears ran a sale on a Performa 6116CD. This was the Gil Amelio era. The machine was one of the first PowerPC and ran 7.5.5 I signed up for e-world which promptly closed and every Mac magazine was pretty sure they were going out of business. Everything was doom and gloom and I was not happy that having finally joined the party it was almost over. I was so enamored at the time I bought a Newton too.
In any event, I thought I would enjoy it while it lasted. I bought a Powerbook 190 and had a killer little network. I used Timbuktu before it was fashionable and had a great time. As fate would have it, not long after that Steve came back, and I have never looked back.
chuck freedman
· 1 year ago
Thinking back to 1991/92 when I used to take my Powerbook 140 running SoundEdit (I believe it was SE for multitrack audio editing), to a local radio station where I was interning (94.7 FM, WCSX). I learned to MultiTrack edit on a reel-to-reel from the Production Director, Mark Blackwell - an awesome musician and PD. Yet, I taught him about digital audio editing. Today, nobody uses reel-to-reel, only digital and on a much larger scale. I just know that I was there at the beginning. I worked with the best. Learned from the best and also helped train the best!
Jeff
· 1 year ago
I was all set to buy an Apple IIe with the duo-disk drive until I happened to see this new Apple computer with a small screen. WYSIWYG fonts (yes, I used to put 8 or 9 different fonts on a letter...because I could). MacPaint and MacWrite were so cool and yet they ran, along with the system, on a 400K floppy disk. Although my first Mac was a "fat mac" I soon traded up to an SE/30, which I still run Tetris and Spectre on. I won't even mention what I paid for my first 300/1200 baud Apple modem to get online.
Brytne
· 1 year ago
We had an apple IIe growing up. My first experience with mac happened on Jr. high. The writing lab had three of them, and I loved getting to play with a mouse for the first time. Later in college I was a TA in the mac lab for three semesters.
I haven't owned an apple product, since the IIe, until this year, when my wonderful husband surprised me with this kick butt touch.
Happy birthday Mac! I hope to own one of your sweet systems soon! :D
Paul Pippen
· 1 year ago
I was amazed at the awesome graphics when my brother showed me his Mac in 1986. I was used to seeing printouts from my Apple II+ with an Orangemicro card on my old Epson printer. I often try to remember how impressive that Image Writer was when I get frustrated with today's inkjets & lasers!
Chris Summers
· 1 year ago
My first experience was the original Macintosh on the sailing yacht "Apple Macintosh" that Apple sponsored on the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. It was 1985. I was 7 yeas old. The boat had the multicolored stripes down the side, very cool.
designtwit
· 1 year ago
My first memories of Mac was in college in 1986. The art department at Memphis State purchased their first Macs. Mac Classics I suppose or maybe SEs? I know the entire operating system fit on a floppy disk. Our graphic design work became this typography hybrid where we would make text, print it and then do paste-up with it to get our typography right. The typography on the first Macs lacked the finesse and sophistication of Service Bureau type. But, as students we loved the cheap, immediate results that we could xerox, cut-up and manipulate into beautiful work. April Greiman was my hero.
By the time I reached grad school at NC State in 1988 we had a Mac lab that was full of the first Mac IIci's. And yes, we had to sign-up and share the lab with everyone in the design program. We were still producing student work in a hybrid of Pagemaker and Photoshop layouts, stat machine, xerox, chromatex (sp?) to get color, marker comps and colored paper. Color out-put was pricey and saved for final portfolio. The work was no-less beautiful though.
My first agency job we had a couple of Quadra 650's that we shared. It was with Quark Xpress that I was trained to see the entire project digitally, in its final form to the printer- in color transforming the printing industry forever.
I had seen the PERQ at CMU, and here was a machine that would be widely available that could do what appeared to be similar things. At the time I was building large scale shared memory multiprocessor systems for DARPA, but I started hacking the Mac nights and weekends. I wound up joining Apple's Advanced Technology Group working for Larry Tesler, and started the Cambridge MA ATG Lab, where we did Common Lisp and Dylan. Then moved to Cupertino to head Development Tools, then MacOS (where we did MkLinux on top of the Mach 3.0 microkernel), and eventually headed up software at Apple. As Bob Brunner says: "I worked at Apple between Jobs."
Harvey@16
· 1 year ago
I wasn't there. I am just 16. But in my rather brief experienes with the macintosh I feel I can spea for everyone when I say "Happy Hirthday Mac!"
Harvey@16
· 1 year ago
ok, I made a few spelling mistakes! ah well! happy Hirthday mac!
I remember getting ready for the big announcement while working at General Micro in Indiana. We were a big Apple dealer and the Lisa was one of my favorite machines. When January rolled around we received our first shipment of 128k Macs and the software MacWrite and MacPaint. I remember buying our first 128k out of the first shipment! Scoot forward 25 years and we have 5 Macs and I still have the original point of sale posters with the transparent Mac and the Picasa logo.
As a side note... my favorite promotion as a dealer was the Test Drive program where the customer came to the store, signed a form, and brought a Mac home for the evening! When they brought is back, they received a driving glove and a luggage tag. We sold so many Macs just from people using it for the night!
oceanwest
· 1 year ago
It all started for me just about a year and a half later I knew my brother purchased the Mac 512Ke for his business. I was using an Apple ][ + at the time. I had came over to his house for the weekend, I went upstairs in his loft where the Mac was setup, and it was if there were a halo around it sitting there quant at the end of the room. We flicked it on and heard that crisp "BONG" well, lets just say i missed dinner as I was totally in love at first site. Since we had plans to go see a movie, I reluctantly pried myself away. The movie: Star Trek IV "The Voyage Home" probably the very first product placement for the Macintosh in a movie, where Scotty tries to verbally interfaces with the Mac, when that failed Dr. McCoy handed him the mouse, where Scotty attempts to speak into the mouse as a microphone... when they showed the Macintosh on screen my brother and I looked at each other knowing in an instant that we have embarked in to a new era!
None the less the crew saved the day. We got home and I returned to the loft where the now Famous Macintosh sat with that halo proudly shining. A few years later my brother was very busy in his business and needed a specialized software that wasn't available for the Macintosh. It was then banished to the basement covered in a garbage bag. I said WHAT! you can't do that. Suffice it to say the computer came home with me. ( I did not sleep that night at all!) I was feverishly trying every program, every desk accessory, - everything. Each program had an entire operating system on the floppy disk. My favorite program was FileMaker Plus, a seemingly little database program (Formerly named Nutshell - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filemaker) hence i own and operate the largest discussion forum (http://www.fmforums.com)
Over the years I have taught myself how to make databases, and graphic design. About that time I got a new computer it was the Macintosh Plus, with 2 floppy drives and a HARD DRIVE! When in high school as a freshman I was the only student who had one (a Mac) the teacher in the Graphics Arts department had three of them on day student killed a keyboard somehow, I had a spare keyboard so I became teachers pet when brought mine with me while they waited to get a replacement.
Years have passed and I have owned: Apple ][ Plus, Macintosh 512k E, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh LC, Macintosh VX, Macintosh 7100, QuickTake 150, Powerbook 170, Newton Message Pad 130, Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet), PowerBook G3 (Lombard), iBook (Dual USB), iMac( Bondi Blue), iMac 15 inch Flat Panel (LampStyle) PowerMac G4(QuickSilver), iSight Camera, PowerBook 12 Inch, MacBookPro 15 Inch, Mac Mini, IMac 24 Inch Aluminum (Spring 08), MacBook Pro 15 Inch (Spring 08), IPhone 1gen, iPhone 3G, Original iPod, iPod Dock connector 30 GB, Original iPodNano, Apple TV. Cinema Displays 19 inch CRT, Blue & White, and 20 inch LCD. Airport Base Station (all versions) Airport Extreme and Time Capsule, Airport Express.
MacWorld '09 is only days away and I have gone every year for the past decade, I will be a shame how the show will change, I am only hoping for the best!
Tony
· 1 year ago
I was in my first years Japan (ca. 1991-1992) struggling with a Wa-Pro (word-processor), and then decided to take the plunge after hearing rumblings about this Internet thing. Bought a used PowerBook 180, a Stylewriter printer, and a US Robotics 28K external modem. I remember the chills - the goofy gurgle of the modem connect, and the AOL presentation of the Chicago Trib on its silky monochrome screen. The Powerbook is in my closet and still gets started once or twice a year. It brought magic to me 6000 miles from home.
C Michael Jones
· 1 year ago
I remember the excitement when the 128k Macintosh was introduced and was being sold at a local office supply store. You could take the Mac home for several days to try it out. The machine was revolutionary. It could make sounds, not just beeps, and could be controlled with a mouse. MacPaint would routinely quit and show a shaky screen with a round bomb and a fuse. Of course, there was no hard drive, just a floppy, and you could only run one application at a time - it was lovely. My business, an aircraft fixed base operation started in 1976, has run on nothing but Apple computers. At that time there was no software capable of quoting aircraft charter flights and so I learned to program and created everything myself. We are still using only Macs and love the ease of use and freedom from viruses. Thank you Apple.
sonicdeviant
· 1 year ago
I was 14 when the first Mac came out; I was using the Apple IIe in school, but we DID NOT have a Mac at home. Didn't get my first until 8 years later--a Macintosh Classic II running System 7. I followed that up a 2 years later with a Macintosh Performa 636. 6 years later I got a PowerMac G4! 4 years after that, I got a Powerbook, 3G iPod, Airport Express, and a Mac Mini. Just recently, I got a MacPro and MacBook (black one), and we've got 3 iPods in the house! Yep, I'm an Apple fanboy! 6 months from now I'll get my first iPhone too!
Kathryn
· 1 year ago
I started with BIG iron. Huge IBM machines, then bigger IBM machines. If a machine couldn't run 40 users what good was it? I even made my husband write his Master's thesis using a TI Silent 700 acoustical coupled keyboard (with lasts-five-minutes thermal paper) hooked to Tymshare computers in Valley Forge, PA, and printed on Diablo keyboards in Cupertino, CA.
But we really needed a typewriter. I was too cheap to buy a typewriter when I could buy an entire computer. So our first Mac was the reliable 512K machine that we bought in 1986. We even bought it a spiffy 20 Kb hard drive in a fancy case for it. We only could afford a slow printer, but every so often I snuck into work and printed things out on their amazing LaserPrinter. Boy, was that slow. Now 23 years later we have multiple Mac desktops, multiple MacBook Pros, iPhones, and iPods. My husband is a profession digital photographer. (Even bought one of the first dye-sub printers.) Yes, we are Apple fanatics and will be at MacWorld in just two days!
Daniel Ha
· 1 year ago
I remember a few Macs in my family while I was growing up: an Apple II tucked away in the corner of the den, a Macintosh I used to play bundled-in games and type up reports, and two tiny 9 inch Powerbooks I fiddled around with.
But my family also had PCs at home, and as I quickly took onto PC games, I stayed with the DOS and Windows machines -- almost solely. I barley knew how to get around a Mac OS interface and I despised them every time I had to touch one at school.
I purchased my first Mac a little under 2 years ago. It took a little while to get used to, and now I prefer using one to Windows. I'm on my second Mac laptop now.
José Couto Nogueira
· 1 year ago
I had an Apple IIc and, as a writer, used it everyday. It was so beautiful, so airy, in a world of ugly PCs! Two disk drives (123K was it?), one external, so I didn't have to change disks every time I saved. Dozens of soft disks to store data... So many memories... So much forgotten... Than the Mac came out and I couldn't believe it — the white screen, those continuous sharp lines, the flourish of the type! It was one of those few moments in your life that you are seeing something really new and you know at the very moment, that is new (like when I first saw "Einstein on the beach" or heard Roxy Music). But it was bulky and, for some reason, I didn't feel the need to possess it. Only a couple of months later I realized that I could use the accents of my native language (portuguese) I that was it! The majority of people I run into nowadays doesn't even know how it was before the mac (windows, for the majority of poor devils). They can't know what it is to see a mac for the first time in a world of ms-dos (or whatever it was called). But I know, I was there!
MAS
· 1 year ago
My first Mac was a Power Computing Mac clone. It worked fairly well, and eventually even ran OS X (via Xpostfacto). It would probably still be working if the person who I gave it to was more knowledgable about the Mac.
Levent Mollamustafaoglu
· 1 year ago
Here is the story of my first Mac and my first Lisa:
They were HUGE to begin with. I remember them in my fourth grade classes.
They were second-grade computers, and still are today.
jo
· 1 year ago
i was two, suck a nigger dick
Joe Manich
· 1 year ago
I joined the Mac culture in November 2006, so I'm new to the game, after 20+ years in the computer industry. All I have to say is that I'm sorry that I came to the party this late, I could have had a lot more fun!
scottperezfox
· 1 year ago
At first I used a Commodore 64, then onto DOS, then Windows, and finally the Mac. In January 2002, the University of Pennsylvania bookstore had a special sale where everything was offered tax-free. I seized the opportunity and bought an 867-MHz G4 with an Apple Studio Display. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
steve
· 1 year ago
my first one was a powerbook g4 1.33ghz with 10.3 panther brand new 12in was over 2k but when i switched i never thought of going back to know that u could do movies and pic editing so much better. All this time ive been using windows and had no idea how horrible that operation system is.
Francois Proulx
· 1 year ago
My first Mac was a used TiBook (Powerbook) 15inch the FW800 revision. After spending almost 10 years in the PC world, building my custom boxes and laughing at Macs... without any actual reason now that I think about it... I started to be really jaleous when I entered college and a friend of mine showed me OS X Panther . But what sealed the deal was the WWDC announcement of OS X 10.4. I fell in love and said to myself that my next computer would be a Mac. I got an opportunity to buy a used TiBook and had so much fun playing with iLife 04' . Then MacWorld came and I ordered the Mac Mini during the keynote, sold all my old PCs and bought 4 Macs since then. I'm now saving a bit for the new unibody 15 inch ! :-)
Perry Lund
· 1 year ago
I was a sophomore in college on spring break 1984 and went to Sioux City IA. mall where Team Electronics store had the new Mac 128K machine. It was my first experience using a Mac. My second experience was the summer of 1985, when a roommate at college brought a new Mac 512K machine and he let me use it to type papers for summer classes. I married in January 1986 and we purchased a used Mac 512 in the summer of 1986. We bought a special 2 MB kit and used a RAM Disk to load the OS. We used MacWrite and FullWrite alongside of Ready Set Go and PageMaker.
Victor Gregg
· 1 year ago
My first Apple Computer was a ][e, and my first Mac as the Mac 512KB. I later upgraded to Mac SE30 and then added a color card and monitor. I still have the SE30.
I now have a family of macbooks (me and all of the kids). My career in telecommunications / computer science has come full circle. I was writing code for Macs and Unix in 1987. Now Macs are Unix, and iPhones are Macs. Wow!
chrisindallas
· 1 year ago
I turned 14 that January, and spent all year reading and dreaming about Apple's new computer, reading Mac World and Mac User. I had been saving for an Apple ][ to replace my Vic20, but by my 15th birthday, I had enough to put a dent in an original 128K Macintosh price and my mom financed the rest on an Apple card, which I made the payments on with my dish washing job. We drove 2 hours to buy it at a Computerland.
Later, I bought the Apple backpack so I could lug it with me that summer to visit my dad, who was a DOS man. I also had an Image Writer II printer. Eventually, I got the 512KE upgrade, and later the Plus upgrade. Other than MacPaint and MacWrite, my first program for it was Microsoft Basic. Later, I bought the Apple Assemble, which I never mastered.
I didn't get a hard drive for it until 1990, when I could afford a 52MB SCSI drive that sat under the machine. I remember the key selling point of the drive is that it cam loaded with Shareware. I kept this computer until December of 1993 when I replaced it with a pizza box LC.
Bob Simons
· 1 year ago
I didn't pay much attention to the Mac for the first year, hearing things to the effect that it could do nearly what the Lisa could do, but only for about $3000 instead of the $10,000 for the Lisa. My sister had the hard drive Lisa and a Mac 128, and kept talking it up to me. So in March '85, I went to the dealer (the local college bookstore) and bought a 128, the second floppy drive, Mac Word 1.0, an ImageWriter and (does anyone remember) Creighton MacSpell). It couldn't run MacSpell on the 128, I found out quickly. I went back to the store and said, "You lied" and the guy just smiled and said, "well, yes we did. You need to buy this here 512 instead."
Steve Holden
· 1 year ago
My first Macintosh wasn't until August 1986 with a 512K version. I got it for my freshman year at SDSU in computer science. I came down early to take some calculus tests to get excused from pre-calculus requirements. I took the computer home and basically never got to use it again because my Dad fell in love with it. He sent me back down to school in September to purchase my own Mac Plus which I used as my main machine all through college. I fondly remember using Think C and doing all my programming assignments in my dorm room vice in the computer center. I still have it in the garage, and it still boots and runs! :-)
James
· 1 year ago
I was only 13 when the Macintosh was released, and with a new Apple //e at home, I wouldn't stand a chance convincing my parents I needed one. I do remember the first time I sat down at one. It was at a department store (Macy's perhaps?) in a Wichita Kansas shopping mall. There was one Macintosh displayed and not a single salesperson around so I got to sit down and play with it without interruption. I can remember using MacPaint and being blown away by what you could accomplish so easily. 25 years later I now have that Mac and nearly every one since in my collection of over 170 Apple computers, and like back then, I'm continually amazed by what I can do on my Mac.
Adrian Koss
· 1 year ago
In 1984 I got a Commodore 64. Later I had a x86-Microsoft-DOS-PC. One day - in 2006 - my sister got an Apple Mac mini. I never thought, that it could be so easy to install and use a computer.
Later my sister build a wooden tea-game-computer-table wit an Apple Mac mini inside: http://www.gestalterin.eu
Regards from Germany
Philip
· 1 year ago
I was a baby back then, maybe 3 years old, one of my oldest memories.
I wasn't big on drawing with pencils, but my aunt had a Mac and I abused the crap out of MacPaint. She still reminds me of it whenever she sees me working with Illustrator or Photoshop. Long live the Mac.
Dean Meyers
· 1 year ago
Hi Dave, I was the Sales and Technical Representative for the Carribean Region for Apple between 1983-1985, and the introduction of the Macintosh was a challenge because of the now-common Graphical User Interface and the mouse...I wrote a brief anecdote about teaching teachers how to "mouse" on my blog
Thad
· 1 year ago
Back in '84 I was still using an Apple II at school running *gasp* DOS. and learned Basic, Fortran, COBOL and Pascal. Every new semester I needed to learn the program before I could write letters or anything else. It would be another two years before I used a real computer( Mac 512). I am still showing other people how to use and upgrade their Macs.
Doug I
· 1 year ago
Bought our first Mac as the first major purchase of our marriage(1988). We were both going to university. She needed it for her masters and I just wanted to play. Had to order without a hard drive. Got a Mac SE and an Imagewriter. Lasted a long time and added an extra drive from Jasmine just before it went under. Luckily we never got billed for the drive ($400 for 40 MB drive). Passed it on to my dad and he used it and we still have it. Retired on a shelf until I change it into a Macquarium.
MacSmiley
· 1 year ago
It took over 18 years for me to get my first Mac. Story at 11.
Well... um... actually, the full story is on my website... It's best read in it's native environment:
I've been using IBM PC's since the mid-80's and always kept my distance from the Apple world. Until about 2 years ago. I thought I'd buy an iMac desktop for home since I really loved my iPod. Never looked back. Now have 2 iMac's, a Macbook Pro and a MacBook Air and love all of them.
Cody
· 1 year ago
I was talking to my friend, and his father was giving a blueberry iMac G3 away to anyone who wanted it. I gladly took it off his hands and had the adventure of getting the password. I was up for a whole night trying to get into the administrators account and got into it from the Mac equivalent of the bios. I used that iMac for a couple months and my father decided to buy me a Mac mini, which I am still using today. :)
Bernard W
· 1 year ago
My first mac was an Apple IIe given to me by my uncle back in 1992. With a colour screen, mouse and a science kit that took temperature and light readings I thought this was amazing piece of machinery. I was 5 at the time. That Apple IIe lives at my parents house and still works as well today as it did the day I received it.
Aubrey Semple
· 1 year ago
It was 1998 when I first experienced Apple, besides the fact that I used Apple machines at school (elementary) It was the the Strawberry iMac... my first love. It was that machine that made me love computing in general. from there came the iMac G4 flat-panel, PowerBook G4 (Ti), iBook G4, Power Mac G5, iMac G5, iMac Intel and Mac Book Pro (15-inch). Yes, I guess I am a Mac Addict. And it all started over a decade ago. Happy b-day Macintosh, I LOVE YOU!!!
Jonathan Marks
· 1 year ago
I was involved with a early computer show on Dutch radio called Hobbyscoop in 1984, as well as presenting a show on Radio Netherlands called Media Network. We did everything on the Apple II and later the IIe. There was a scheme to buy one of the first Mac's but it was slow to take off because of the Lisa fiasco prior to the Mac. I ended up waiting for the Mac II, later upgrading to the Mac IIx. I also bought one of the early Laserprinters for 6000 dollars. That was a huge investment in those days, but it all lasted 8 years with no problems. By the early 90's, the whole PowerMac range was very confusing and I had problems with poor foreign language support from Apple in the Netherlands. Apple was one of the vendors we considered for a newsroom project at the TV station I was working out - with hindsight I am glad they didn't get the contract. Today would be different. Happy Birthday Mac.
gregreher
· 1 year ago
My first programming experience came on various models of the the Apple II series. I even recall an attempt by a teacher of mine at running a CADD program on a IIe (this would have to have been sometime between '84 and '85). I think I had graduated by the time he finally got it up and running.
rickw
· 1 year ago
I was watching the superbowl and saw this incredible commercial. I was blown away. I already owned an Apple II+, which was dated. What I saw, blew my mind! This is one of the greatest companies ever.
DougRivers
· 1 year ago
I missed seeing the 1984 commercial during the Super Bowl that year, but one couldn't miss seeing it on the morning news shows the following morning. I had been working with various mainframe computers for about 10 years by then and my personal computer at that time was a Timex-Sinclair Z80 that was very frustrating to use (and I was used to convoluted, 45-minute boot-up times on mainframes) and I was intrigued by the promise of a computer that would be simple to use.
It would be several months (and a lot of overtime pay) before I was finally able to visit the local computer boutique shop (The Computer Emporium in Louisville, KY) which was the only place in town where you could get your hands on a Macintosh. Using the mouse to move folders and documents around was a revelation and I was hooked, so Halloween afternoon 1984, I plunked down $2500 (almost 3 months pay at the time) for an original Macintosh 128k and an ImageWriter printer (thankfully, it was a sale bundle deal) and have never looked back.
I have owned about a dozen Macs since then, and have been very happy with my relationship (except for one unremarkable LC model back in the 90s) and have never allowed a PC into my house.
Happy Anniversary Mac!
Daniel Lodewyk
· 1 year ago
My family got our first Mac in 1993 (when I was five years old). My father used a Macintosh Classic while he worked on his graduate degree at the University of Alberta. When Apple Computers Inc. introduced the Color Classic he bought one along with a Apple Printer.
I remember going to Westworld Computers and being so excited to pick up our new mac. We bought the Mac Arcade Pack and Skyshadow games. I always wanted to play Duke Nukem on it so I lost interest pretty quick, except for school work. I loved handing in printed documents to my teachers. It lasted a long time and we recycled it just last year. It was a great machine.
gbailey
· 1 year ago
I was there, working at an Apple dealership as a service tech, repairing Apple II's, IIe's and the Lisa while occasionally doing sales too. I continued on in the "Apple Way" handling Apple's K-12 business in the public schools and also became an Apple student rep on campus at NMSU. I eventually ended up managing an Apple dealership back in New Mexico and now I am the founder and president of SnakeHead Software, LLC where we build fun games for the iPhone and IPod touch. At SnakeHead, "It's all fun and games!". I still have a bunch of original "hat pins" for Macintosh, IIe, etc as well as one of the original nylon type banners we used to hang up in the store that simply reads "Macintosh" with the Apple logo. Hmmm, I wonder if any of that stuff is worth anything these days????
Michael Ehrman
· 1 year ago
I was there before the Mac was there. Let me explain. As an Apple developer since 1977 I was invited to develop software for the Macintosh. Requirement was to purchase a Lisa. While normally I would not have spent $10K for a computer, the fact that the Mac was to originally sell for under $2K and the graphical interface seemed so intuitive and simple, with my developer discount I purchased the Lisa in preparation for writing software for the Mac. In late 1983, under non disclosure, I was introduced to the Macintosh computer in the Apple western regional offices in Newport Beach. From what I saw and played with I felt this would be the future of computers and Apple would have a winner. No more command line typing or using menu launch programs.
Personally 400K floppies with usually under 100-180K of available space seemed small and I was hoping that Apple would use hard drives like the IBM XT/286 had and the Lisa Profile which offered 5MB to 10MB of storage. I also noted that 128K of RAM was almost no RAM when PCs offered 256K to as much as 640K. These issues would need to be addressed and I contacted Jean Louis Gasse about these observed shortcomings as he was head of product development. It had been years since I dealt directly with Steve Jobs on Apple hardware. As we all know, over the next year Apple and third party companies dealt with these shortcomings.
I have enjoyed Apple and the Macintosh and never looked back.
Michael Ehrman
· 1 year ago
I was there before the Mac was there. Let me explain. As an Apple developer since 1977 I was invited to develop software for the Macintosh. Requirement was to purchase a Lisa. While normally I would not have spent $10K for a computer, the fact that the Mac was to originally sell for under $2K and the graphical interface seemed so intuitive and simple, with my developer discount I purchased the Lisa in preparation for writing software for the Mac. In late 1983, under non disclosure, I was introduced to the Macintosh computer in the Apple western regional offices in Newport Beach. From what I saw and played with I felt this would be the future of computers and Apple would have a winner. No more command line typing or using menu launch programs.
Personally 400K floppies with usually under 100-180K of available space seemed small and I was hoping that Apple would use hard drives like the IBM XT/286 had and the Lisa Profile which offered 5MB to 10MB of storage. I also noted that 128K of RAM was almost no RAM when PCs offered 256K to as much as 640K. These issues would need to be addressed and I contacted Jean Louis Gasse about these observed shortcomings as he was head of product development. It had been years since I dealt directly with Steve Jobs on Apple hardware. As we all know, over the next year Apple and third party companies dealt with these shortcomings.
I have enjoyed Apple and the Macintosh and never looked back.
Christoph
· 1 year ago
As a student in the 80s in Germany I could not afford a Mac. So I bought an Atari ST and used the Mac emulator Spectre GCR. Does anybody rember? In the early 90s I bought my first Mac (LC). And I using Macs ever since. I wrote some facts and tales about the Mac on http://www.mac-history.net (in English) and http://www.mac-histroy.de (in German)
I first saw the 128k Mac in a store in Grand Rapids, MI in the early 1980's I was really intrigued by it and then discovered a friend in my home town who had purchased one. Before I purchased the 128k Mac, the 512k Mac was out. I bought one in Muskegon and shortly after that I purchased a Mac Plus to use in my dental office and was able to use the Dental Mac program, which was in use at that time. I used the Dental Mac program for over 20 years and had updated the computer many times to the final iMac at the time of retirement. I have since purchased a 17 in Mac Book pro and a new iMac for home use. They are great computers! Congratulations to the Mac Team for their continued success. P.S. I also have a Windows machine, but rarely use it.
Steve Still
· 1 year ago
My first mac was my parent's IIsi. That baby rocked! My friend had one as well and bought a "CD burner" for over $1500, in 1992. He had a small cottage business of burning CD's for people at $50 a pop.
My actual first Mac was a 7200, in 1996. I upgraded to a 512k cache card and was the envy of all my friends.
I've shared my first Mac story on my weekly Mac Podcast, The Mac Minute. Check it out at www.themacminute.net.
Here's to another 25 years of Macintosh!
Glenn_in_Vancouver
· 1 year ago
1983... I got a chance to briefly play with a Lisa and knew it represented the future.
1984... with a few dollars in my pocket, I saw the 128k Macintosh as an obtainable Lisa and, when the Canadian prices came down to $2900+, I purchased one in the summer of 1984 and never looked back. I added a dot-matrix ImageWriter for output, then an external 400k floppy (so the system + application could reside on the internal 400k disc and files could go on the external). Pure bliss!
In spring 1985 my local (Kelowna) Apple dealer was going-out-of-business and most of my friends felt I had made a big mistake (they were using Atari 400 & 800s), and I bought a few items at the bankruptcy sale including the etched glass "Picasso" sign (with the light in the base) which I still have stored in my crawlspace.
Upgraded the 128k Mac to a Mac Plus while a grad student in North Carolina in 1986, and kept that configuration until 1992, when I upgraded to a Centris 650 with 14-inch colour monitor.
Added a PowerBook 1400c for portable computing in 1997, and upgraded my desktop to the 600 MHz G3 iMac in 2002 (and then a 1.8 GHz G5 iMac in 2004).
Now I run a 3.06 GHz 24-inch Intel iMac & use a 1.8 GHz MacBook Air for my portable needs... and am looking forward to the next 25 years.
DigitalDoyle
· 1 year ago
I got the very first Macworld, unbidden, in the mail in early 1984 and had to have the Macintosh. I still have that inaugural issue and my original 128K Mac.
I remember seeing the commercial during the Superbowl. We'd been using an Apple ][e for about a year. It wasn't until some time in '87 that we bought a Mac SE after seeing a demo at work. Since then we've used a Quadra, a Power Computing clone, a couple of iMacs, a couple of iBooks, and a MacBook.
All Comments
http://www.folklore.org/index.py
Whole new worlds opened up... remembering chat rooms at Compuserve (hello to former fellow MAUG-ers from the "DragonLady!"), early MacWorld events in San Fran and Boston, eWorld... if it weren't for that first Mac, I'd never have met my dearly loved husband (thanks TalkCity!) and so many other great folks nor would I be a community manager today.
25 years later and I'm still a Mac-aholic, with a MacBook Pro and iMac living on my desk.
Soon after the original Mac launch, it showed up in Toronto in a shop window on Queen Street. There was I recall just one store selling it. My friend Rob and I went in to see it. I remember playing with MacPaint, checking out how the system worked. I was hooked. I HAD to have this now!. This was a revolution I had to be part of. Then, I looked at the price tag. "Boom". The dream was over. As a student it was far out of my reach. But it had already begun to work on me. All the more so after having to turn back to the Apple II which from then on seemed like being relegated to the Gulag.
I could not have imagined that only 4 years later I would be in the US working as a programmer developing Mac software for a start-up, leaving my career as an art historian in the dust. But that is exactly what happened. And that was just the start.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Mac changed my life. From the first moment, it was a transforming experience that would never have happened had we stayed in any of the DOS land flavors. It is very tough to get this across to people today. It wasn't just that it was a new and better toy. Really, on some level it was like seeing a technology from a future culture that somehow had just magically dropped into our laps. A technology that just made instantly clear sense and from which it was clear the world would be a better and very different place thereafter.
To me, everything that has come down the pike since then has been evolution, not revolution. It has been a very long time since I gave thanks for that. But wow, how different my life would have been otherwise. And I know in my heart, a sadly diminished one. Thank you Mac!
http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2005/05/how-b...
Apple's Macintosh Unveiled, Compute! Magazine ISSUE 47 / APRIL 1984 / PAGE 44
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue47/m...
I begged my parents to get it, and since it was morning in America, they somehow found the $2500 to buy this 128k Mac with no hard drive (not that we knew better at the time). My friends whose parents worked at Wang or IBM laughed at me because 'that thing has no power.' My uncle grilled me on what the hell I thought was going to do with this overpriced toy.
That year I started making newspapers with MacPaint, MacWrite and pasteup boards. I'd bring them down to the offset printer who would make me a few hundred of these carefully typeset pages. They look awful by today's standards, but the printers then were amazed by the variety of fonts, and the graphics I would draw pixel by pixel. They were used to seeing pages typed out on IBM Selectrics.
I went on to do desktop publishing at an independent publisher out of college, and then co-found a series of Internet startups. I thank the Mac for fusing both sides of my brain and fueling a career in an area that is changing the world.
Second story is about that 1984 ad. You may have heard this, but Chiat Day wanted to enter the ad in the Clios which meant it would have had to run during 1983, but obviously that would have blown the secret of the Mac. So what they did was to run it in the middle of the night on a station that usually signed off at midnight somewhere in Montana. Which always made me wonder if there wasn't some guy asleep on the couch with the TV still on, who was awakened by the sound, saw the 1984 commercial and then the screen goes back to snow and white noise.
One day a harbinger of change showed up in the computer room in the form of a small beige box, right next to our VAX - read the rest of the story on my blog
But then the Mac came along and it was a stunning leap. I was skeptical of the too-simple-by-half interface initially. I got over it. I fell in love.
Life is good.
Was so new. Had uses a SWTP with cross compiler to make software for it and final got mainstay to do it native on the Mac.
Hate to think of the computering world without this mega milestone!
Still remember the incredible feeling of using a mouse to control the screen and also experiencing the first WYSIWYG environment. It's actually hard to explain that the MS-Dos machines were primarily green text on black screen with only one style of text displayable. The changes in print had to be controlled with html like prompts inside the text line and changes in the font were controlled by the built in font sets in the printer itself. Crazy.
Trying to explain that the first real hard drives were like 5MB and my first built-in HD was 20MB with an external 40MB on an SE is laughable to current generation users. One terabyte is how much bigger? A couple photos from a digital camera can be 20 MB. My 30-60 minute audio podcasts for The Tennis Podcast are over 20MB.
The limitations of the original Mac could in no way take away the experience that it gave. My only regret is that Apple did not find a way to make it's product acceptable to the business world earlier. Oh, and that Apple didn't win the suit against Microsoft for completely copying the whole finder concept. Recycle, hmm.
There hasn't been one computer innovation since that has been as dramatic as the Macintosh.
I was walking through a mall one afternoon in 1984 when I saw the Macintosh for the first time; it was sitting on a pedestal at the entrance to a computer store. I walked up to it, stared at the strange little box for a few seconds, watched the demo. Within a few weeks I got my hands on one for the first time, when a friend called me over to see his new Mac.
I didn't get my own Mac until the Mac Plus was released. Going from a Commodore 64 with 32K of RAM, to the Mac with 1MB of RAM, was a profound experience. As a professional musician, I was using the C64 to record MIDI; 1984 was the first year that MIDI hit the music scene, and I was recording jingles with it within the first year. To go to the Mac, where I had unlimited recording tracks and this wild new interface, was amazing for me.
I think the first Mac OS I used was System 2.1, but it's hard to remember. I sold that first Mac Plus to a friend for $1200, and last year he gave it back to me, complete with floppies that contain Mac OS 7.
I added a hard drive to the Mac Plus; it was a Jasmine $1300, 80 MB drive. What a beauty that was! Then I added another MB of RAM by opening the box and putting in a circuit board and a jumper... I was high-tech. I remember when Quickeys was announced, used to use DiskTop all the time (remember it?), remember all the early app-switchers that were released.
Twenty-five years later, I own a hosting company and host websites and FileMaker databases, all on Macs; I have a network of 30 Macs of all stripes--G5s, Xserves, a couple of old G4s that are soon to be retired.
I've never been an Apple fan by any means. I will use one if required to, but Windows all the way for me.
Happy 25th.
This was sent from an iPod Touch
People thought I was crazy when I said computers would become like TVs, that they'd have music and video on them, that one day everyone would be able to do video work on their systems. The computer video workflow I did at the time was expensive, slow, and impractical, so no one thought it could evolve. But I had seen how computers evolved into Macs, and that inspired me to see their potential... and it still does.
eventually i grew up and moved far away from my parents, but my love for macs never wavered. i have a macbookpro, a mac mini and a clamshell ibook for playing retro games on. macs taught me to be a leet haxor.
I've owned several Macs since then. Just bought a new MacBook, and have an iMac at home and at work. My kids have been raised on Macs and groan insufferably when they are forced to deal with PCs.
The first Mac I owned was a 7600. I got it for a song due to a type-o in a retail ad. Computer City guaranteed they would meet or beat any competitors price. it was 1997 and I saved $1,200.00
I now own 7 Macs from various periods, 4 iPods and 2 Apple NEWTONS! I am lost in a sea of Mac and loving it.
I still remember figuring out how to enter a formula in Multiplan. Type an '=' and then CLICK IN THE CELLS YOU WANT TO ADD! Holy cow. And MacPaint!
So, the first purchase was a 128 Mac (even though the 512 was shipping or was imminent, I forget which). An ImageWriter, a case. Multiplan/Chart and OverVue (now Panorama) and an external floppy drive.
So, the fallout from falling in love with a computer?
I was working for a tax-funded non-profit at the time and had to appeal to a board of elected officials to get the money for the computer. One of the members, a city councilman from Roseville was also a Mac fan and this public hearing turned into a conversation as we talked about the wonder that was Mac and the programs that were pending and MacPaint! That guy became a ringer for me on the board and was key to the future success of the organization I ran.
My work in OverVue led to working in Helix and then in 4th Dimension. In 1990, I left the non-profit world and began a database and Mac consulting business that continues (albeit in a different form) today. Sadly, the original Mac (which was still around) belonged to the non-profit and had to stay there. The first Mac I bought with my own money was an SE/30.
Then the Mac came out in 1984, and it was only $2500! But, naturally, I didn't have any money. So, I started saving for about a year.
By thy time I had the money, the 512k mac was out. I bought my first Mac in 1985, along with an Apple dot matrix printer, at the A&S Department sore in Huntington, NY. It was quite a step up from my Commodore 64.
I would have to say that the Mac has had a bigger effect on my life than any other single prodduct in my lifetime.
I had always wanted a Mac and never could get one, until early 1995 when Sears ran a sale on a Performa 6116CD. This was the Gil Amelio era. The machine was one of the first PowerPC and ran 7.5.5 I signed up for e-world which promptly closed and every Mac magazine was pretty sure they were going out of business. Everything was doom and gloom and I was not happy that having finally joined the party it was almost over. I was so enamored at the time I bought a Newton too.
In any event, I thought I would enjoy it while it lasted. I bought a Powerbook 190 and had a killer little network. I used Timbuktu before it was fashionable and had a great time. As fate would have it, not long after that Steve came back, and I have never looked back.
I haven't owned an apple product, since the IIe, until this year, when my wonderful husband surprised me with this kick butt touch.
Happy birthday Mac! I hope to own one of your sweet systems soon! :D
By the time I reached grad school at NC State in 1988 we had a Mac lab that was full of the first Mac IIci's. And yes, we had to sign-up and share the lab with everyone in the design program. We were still producing student work in a hybrid of Pagemaker and Photoshop layouts, stat machine, xerox, chromatex (sp?) to get color, marker comps and colored paper. Color out-put was pricey and saved for final portfolio. The work was no-less beautiful though.
My first agency job we had a couple of Quadra 650's that we shared. It was with Quark Xpress that I was trained to see the entire project digitally, in its final form to the printer- in color transforming the printing industry forever.
http://www.devguide.net/blog/jacek/The-Macintos...
Thanks for reminding us, Dave!
As a side note... my favorite promotion as a dealer was the Test Drive program where the customer came to the store, signed a form, and brought a Mac home for the evening! When they brought is back, they received a driving glove and a luggage tag. We sold so many Macs just from people using it for the night!
None the less the crew saved the day. We got home and I returned to the loft where the now Famous Macintosh sat with that halo proudly shining. A few years later my brother was very busy in his business and needed a specialized software that wasn't available for the Macintosh. It was then banished to the basement covered in a garbage bag. I said WHAT! you can't do that. Suffice it to say the computer came home with me. ( I did not sleep that night at all!) I was feverishly trying every program, every desk accessory, - everything. Each program had an entire operating system on the floppy disk. My favorite program was FileMaker Plus, a seemingly little database program (Formerly named Nutshell - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filemaker) hence i own and operate the largest discussion forum (http://www.fmforums.com)
Over the years I have taught myself how to make databases, and graphic design. About that time I got a new computer it was the Macintosh Plus, with 2 floppy drives and a HARD DRIVE! When in high school as a freshman I was the only student who had one (a Mac) the teacher in the Graphics Arts department had three of them on day student killed a keyboard somehow, I had a spare keyboard so I became teachers pet when brought mine with me while they waited to get a replacement.
Years have passed and I have owned: Apple ][ Plus, Macintosh 512k E, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh LC, Macintosh VX, Macintosh 7100, QuickTake 150, Powerbook 170, Newton Message Pad 130, Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet), PowerBook G3 (Lombard), iBook (Dual USB), iMac( Bondi Blue), iMac 15 inch Flat Panel (LampStyle) PowerMac G4(QuickSilver), iSight Camera, PowerBook 12 Inch, MacBookPro 15 Inch, Mac Mini, IMac 24 Inch Aluminum (Spring 08), MacBook Pro 15 Inch (Spring 08), IPhone 1gen, iPhone 3G, Original iPod, iPod Dock connector 30 GB, Original iPodNano, Apple TV. Cinema Displays 19 inch CRT, Blue & White, and 20 inch LCD. Airport Base Station (all versions) Airport Extreme and Time Capsule, Airport Express.
MacWorld '09 is only days away and I have gone every year for the past decade, I will be a shame how the show will change, I am only hoping for the best!
But we really needed a typewriter. I was too cheap to buy a typewriter when I could buy an entire computer. So our first Mac was the reliable 512K machine that we bought in 1986. We even bought it a spiffy 20 Kb hard drive in a fancy case for it. We only could afford a slow printer, but every so often I snuck into work and printed things out on their amazing LaserPrinter. Boy, was that slow. Now 23 years later we have multiple Mac desktops, multiple MacBook Pros, iPhones, and iPods. My husband is a profession digital photographer. (Even bought one of the first dye-sub printers.) Yes, we are Apple fanatics and will be at MacWorld in just two days!
But my family also had PCs at home, and as I quickly took onto PC games, I stayed with the DOS and Windows machines -- almost solely. I barley knew how to get around a Mac OS interface and I despised them every time I had to touch one at school.
I purchased my first Mac a little under 2 years ago. It took a little while to get used to, and now I prefer using one to Windows. I'm on my second Mac laptop now.
Than the Mac came out and I couldn't believe it — the white screen, those continuous sharp lines, the flourish of the type! It was one of those few moments in your life that you are seeing something really new and you know at the very moment, that is new (like when I first saw "Einstein on the beach" or heard Roxy Music). But it was bulky and, for some reason, I didn't feel the need to possess it. Only a couple of months later I realized that I could use the accents of my native language (portuguese) I that was it!
The majority of people I run into nowadays doesn't even know how it was before the mac (windows, for the majority of poor devils). They can't know what it is to see a mac for the first time in a world of ms-dos (or whatever it was called). But I know, I was there!
and eventually even ran OS X (via Xpostfacto). It would probably still be
working if the person who I gave it to was more knowledgable about
the Mac.
http://software-development-blog.blogspot.com/2...
I remember them in my fourth grade classes.
They were second-grade computers, and still are today.
I now have a family of macbooks (me and all of the kids). My career in telecommunications / computer science has come full circle. I was writing code for Macs and Unix in 1987. Now Macs are Unix, and iPhones are Macs. Wow!
Later, I bought the Apple backpack so I could lug it with me that summer to visit my dad, who was a DOS man. I also had an Image Writer II printer. Eventually, I got the 512KE upgrade, and later the Plus upgrade. Other than MacPaint and MacWrite, my first program for it was Microsoft Basic. Later, I bought the Apple Assemble, which I never mastered.
I didn't get a hard drive for it until 1990, when I could afford a 52MB SCSI drive that sat under the machine. I remember the key selling point of the drive is that it cam loaded with Shareware. I kept this computer until December of 1993 when I replaced it with a pizza box LC.
Later my sister build a wooden tea-game-computer-table wit an Apple Mac mini inside: http://www.gestalterin.eu
Regards from Germany
I wasn't big on drawing with pencils, but my aunt had a Mac and I abused the crap out of MacPaint. She still reminds me of it whenever she sees me working with Illustrator or Photoshop. Long live the Mac.
Well... um... actually, the full story is on my website... It's best read in it's native environment:
http://homepage.mac.com/mac.zooks/Musings/Perso...
It would be several months (and a lot of overtime pay) before I was finally able to visit the local computer boutique shop (The Computer Emporium in Louisville, KY) which was the only place in town where you could get your hands on a Macintosh. Using the mouse to move folders and documents around was a revelation and I was hooked, so Halloween afternoon 1984, I plunked down $2500 (almost 3 months pay at the time) for an original Macintosh 128k and an ImageWriter printer (thankfully, it was a sale bundle deal) and have never looked back.
I have owned about a dozen Macs since then, and have been very happy with my relationship (except for one unremarkable LC model back in the 90s) and have never allowed a PC into my house.
Happy Anniversary Mac!
I remember going to Westworld Computers and being so excited to pick up our new mac. We bought the Mac Arcade Pack and Skyshadow games. I always wanted to play Duke Nukem on it so I lost interest pretty quick, except for school work. I loved handing in printed documents to my teachers. It lasted a long time and we recycled it just last year. It was a great machine.
Personally 400K floppies with usually under 100-180K of available space seemed small and I was hoping that Apple would use hard drives like the IBM XT/286 had and the Lisa Profile which offered 5MB to 10MB of storage. I also noted that 128K of RAM was almost no RAM when PCs offered 256K to as much as 640K. These issues would need to be addressed and I contacted Jean Louis Gasse about these observed shortcomings as he was head of product development. It had been years since I dealt directly with Steve Jobs on Apple hardware. As we all know, over the next year Apple and third party companies dealt with these shortcomings.
I have enjoyed Apple and the Macintosh and never looked back.
Personally 400K floppies with usually under 100-180K of available space seemed small and I was hoping that Apple would use hard drives like the IBM XT/286 had and the Lisa Profile which offered 5MB to 10MB of storage. I also noted that 128K of RAM was almost no RAM when PCs offered 256K to as much as 640K. These issues would need to be addressed and I contacted Jean Louis Gasse about these observed shortcomings as he was head of product development. It had been years since I dealt directly with Steve Jobs on Apple hardware. As we all know, over the next year Apple and third party companies dealt with these shortcomings.
I have enjoyed Apple and the Macintosh and never looked back.
I wrote some facts and tales about the Mac on
http://www.mac-history.net (in English) and
http://www.mac-histroy.de (in German)
http://www.mac-history.de is right
My actual first Mac was a 7200, in 1996. I upgraded to a 512k cache card and was the envy of all my friends.
Here's to another 25 years of Macintosh!
1984... with a few dollars in my pocket, I saw the 128k Macintosh as an obtainable Lisa and, when the Canadian prices came down to $2900+, I purchased one in the summer of 1984 and never looked back. I added a dot-matrix ImageWriter for output, then an external 400k floppy (so the system + application could reside on the internal 400k disc and files could go on the external). Pure bliss!
In spring 1985 my local (Kelowna) Apple dealer was going-out-of-business and most of my friends felt I had made a big mistake (they were using Atari 400 & 800s), and I bought a few items at the bankruptcy sale including the etched glass "Picasso" sign (with the light in the base) which I still have stored in my crawlspace.
Upgraded the 128k Mac to a Mac Plus while a grad student in North Carolina in 1986, and kept that configuration until 1992, when I upgraded to a Centris 650 with 14-inch colour monitor.
Added a PowerBook 1400c for portable computing in 1997, and upgraded my desktop to the 600 MHz G3 iMac in 2002 (and then a 1.8 GHz G5 iMac in 2004).
Now I run a 3.06 GHz 24-inch Intel iMac & use a 1.8 GHz MacBook Air for my portable needs... and am looking forward to the next 25 years.
Here's my story and some photos of my Mac then and now and a scan of the cover of the first Macworld magazine: http://www.digitaldoyle.com/blog/2009/01/happy-...
Thanks for the opportunity to share.
Enjoy!
DigitalDoyle
Happy anniversary, Mac!
Greg
Wisconsin