Happy 25th Birthday Mac!

[Vincent Ferrari]

<p><em>"Demo of the first Apple Macintosh by Steve Jobs, January 1984, in front of 3000 people. Andy Hertzfeld captured the moment quite well in his retelling: "Pandemonium reigns as the demo completes. Steve has the biggest smile I've ever seen on his face, obviously holding back tears as he is overwhelmed by the moment. The ovation continues for at least five minutes before he quiets the crowd down."" </em></p><p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="425" height="350" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G0FtgZNOD44" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/G0FtgZNOD44"></embed></object></p><p>Steve Jobs unveils the original Macintosh, January 1984.&nbsp; Most of you have probably seen this, but it's still worth watching again or for the first time if you haven't.&nbsp; Of course that original Mac was well out of the price range of most people, but then again, so were most computers at the time.&nbsp; In honor of the Mac's birthday, let's do something completely hacky: what was your first Mac, when did you get it, etc.?</p><p>My first Mac was the 800 Mhz iBook, and I bought it in April of 2004.&nbsp; It was the first time I had ever owned an Apple computer and it was one of the best computers I've ever owned in my life.&nbsp; I later sold it because my company is a heavy Microsoft company and from the moment I sent it to the guy I sold it to, I regretted doing it.&nbsp; I didn't get another Mac until the Intel MacBook came out, and I splurged for the black model, extra RAM, and tons of accessories.&nbsp; I even bought my wife one for Christmas a year later.&nbsp; In the intervening time, I bought a 17" iMac 1.83 Core Duo, and then recently got rid of both my BlackBook and my iMac and replaced it with the new 15" MacBook Pro.</p><p>That's my Mac lineage.&nbsp; What's yours?</p>

[doogald]

I'm newer than you. In my last job, we had Macs in the graphics department (though they started with those crappy Mac clones just before Steve Jobs came back to Apple), and I was somewhat involved in getting them integrated into our network of PCs. My wife's work computer was an LC II back through the 90's. But my first Mac was just two years ago, the MacBook I am now using; we've since replaced the family desktop with an iMac when Leopard came out in 2007; a MacMini actually the day after Leopard was released which is our media computer - it has a USB TV dongle with EyeTV software to give the kitchen area of the house basic TV, plus has all of our iTunes stuff, generally using Front Row; and we bought my son a unibody MacBook last month as he has started high school. My daughter will start college in the fall and we'll replace her four year old Dell with a MacBook, I am sure.

But for the twenty-some years before I bought one, I always wanted one.

[gmontielh]

My first Mac was the original 512K (!!!) upgraded to (a huge) 1 Mb RAM (!!!) with the SCUSSI port included. And yes processor speed was a "superfast" 8 Mhz. Use it for 4 years adding an "big" external 20 Mb HDD (!!!). Later I bought the color Mac which I used for a couple of years when I purchased a Mac which were in separate units: monitor and CPU (Mac Proforma? or something like it). From then my sons have used Macs: iMac, iBook and Mac Book. Meanwhile I've using a Thinkpad given company policy to use Windows (although they were a Mac company before but switched to Windows years back due to Apple lack of business support). Currently I am considering buying a MBP probably the 17 in. When I bought the first Mac, Excel and Word (then solely for the Mac) was worth enough excuse for purchasing the Mac.

[crimsonsky]

My very first Apple computer was the Apple //c that I bought in 1984. I absolutely loved that machine and I still wax nostalgic over it. I wanted either a Mac or a II GS badly when it came time to move on, but I couldn't afford either. I actually wound up buying an Amiga 1000 (yes, the very first model Amiga). I owned the //c for about 3 years. After moving on to the Amiga platform, I stayed with it for almost 10 years.

Sometime about 1990 or 1991, I bought a Mac 512k, but I found it frustrating to use compared to my Amiga so I sold it after 6 months (I bought it used and don't think it was even a current Mac model in the early 90's). (I was trying to run Word on the machine and was going crazy with all the disk swapping (I only had one floppy drive with it)) and just didn't find the Mac all that easy to use compared to the Amiga.

Like a lot of folks, I looked at Mac for years, but could not justify the price of them, especially compared to the Amigas and (eventually) PCs I was using. Macs were just too expensive.

The breakthrough to the Mac came for me in 2005 and the introduction of the Mac Mini. Finally, a Mac I could afford (and actually pay cash for instead of putting it on a credit card!). My son had already been using the Mac for a couple of years then and had been trying to get me to go Mac, but again, I couldn't justify the cost.

I bought my G4 Mini (that I've put into duty as my wife's computer) in May 2005 and haven't looked back! I actually bought it to be a secondary machine to my main Windows box, but within a month, the Windows box was sold and the Mini became my main daily driver. Within 3 months of buying the Mini, I bought a 12" iBook G4.

Now I actually have four Macs - the original G4 Mini, a 1.83 C2D Mini, a 2 GHz Macbook and a 12" Powerbook G4 (inherited from my son). If you told me in early 2005 that less than four years later I'd have four Macs in the house, I'd have thought you were crazy. Needless to say, I couldn't be happier!