Happy birthday, Apple Macintosh

Tre · 2014-01-24 13:38:42

As documented on Apple's website, today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the Macintosh 128k. While the Mac isn't as ubiquitous a computer now as it was in years past, its influence is simply undeniable, so I figured it was as much a date worth celebrating as any.

I'm typing this on a 2010 iMac, but my first Mac was a 2007 model, purchased sometime in January 2008. I wrote the first full draft of Stuck at the Galleria on it later that year, and the HH logo was initially made on it as well! :D

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-01-24 13:45:00

Incidentally, the computer that I am using to type this right now is our only non-Mac that I can think of. It is an HP laptop, and it is OK, although it's probably fairly easy to tell that I would prefer to be using a Mac right now.

I also have a Mac Mini here in the attic, and a half-dead Macbook sitting in the living room so that I might retrieve a few files. The former, poor thing, is very old and has a horribly broken screen, but I still care for it.

Princess Alice · 2014-01-24 13:50:20

I've never owned a Mac, strictly speaking, but I used them a lot during the 2000s.

I've had an iMac G3 with OS 9, the same iMac G3 with OS X Panther, a Mac mini with Panther, and finally a first-generation x86 iMac with OS X Tiger. I enjoyed ALL of them! ^_^

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-01-24 13:57:32

OS 9 had some really cool default desktops. I remember actually crying as a child when they switched over to an OS that didn't have those crazy jellyfish things as an optional backdrop.

Princess Alice · 2014-01-24 14:08:21

OS 9, for all its technical limitations, had some pretty cool stuff. The classic Finder remains one of my favorite file managers of all time, and even the OS X one has never (IMO) been quite as nice. (When did spatial file managers go out of style?)

On a tangentially related note, I showed my sister, a devoted iPhone user, the old rainbow Apple logo a few days ago, and she said she had never seen it before. Makes me feel old. :P

Salix Babylonika · 2014-01-24 15:38:43

and so the hipsterdom began.

lee4hmz · 2014-01-24 16:16:01

I didn't own a Mac that I, like, actually bought new until 2005, but the first Mac I ever used was one of the Macintosh SEs in the top-floor media lab at UVa's Clemons Library. Mom would be there doing research for a paper (PVCC students could use UVa facilities if needed), and my brother and I would be either right along with her on the AT&T 6300s in the computer lab, or watching LaserDiscs on the Macs using an attached Pioneer deck and a small TV.

I started buying (well, begging my Mom to buy) MacUser and reading it ravenously then. But it wasn't until 9th grade in 1991 that I got much more than a few minutes at a time with a Mac...my school at the time had a Mac Classic. The Classic was not a very good Mac; it was a cost-reduced reissue of the SE, and its 8 MHz 68000 processor---quite good in 1984---was barely adequate in 1991. But, slow as it was, it still worked well for word processing and simple graphics, and that's what I spent most of my time doing. I loved MacDraw, and ended up dumping a lot of my mental flotsam to paper with it (misheard song lyrics inspiring abstract art, computer motherboard layouts based on very, very vague ideas of how a RISC machine worked).

Years later, between my brother working at a thrift shop and Virginia Tech having bunches of them, I spent a lot of time using older Macs. I even managed to find a hot-rodded LC 475 one day while out bargain-hunting...this was one of the better 68k desktops, and while it certainly wasn't a full-size Quadra, it was enough to run both MacOS 7.6 and various forms of 68k UNIX (mainly NetBSD, since it worked a little better than Linux). I ended up getting sick of it one day and recycling it, and I've regretted it ever since.

The Mac I ended up buying new was a Mac mini G4 in early 2005, not long after it was announced. Like the Classic, it was something of a runt (a reissue of the last iBook G4 and the eMac as a barebones desktop), but I loved it anyway. OS X was still the darling of the UNIX community at the time, especially after the G5 came out, and the mini delivered that despite having a few glaring flaws (the VGA is dim from using the wrong voltage reference, and the DVI practically doesn't work on monitors bigger than 1280x1024 due to using a quirk of DVI that few monitors support). I've also managed to inherit a few castoff PowerPC Macs from work, though only the iMac G4 is home right now due to lack of space.

While I don't use a Mac as a daily driver (let's face it, white-box PCs are cheaper, and I'm enough of a Deb-head to navigate its foibles), I still like the older ones quite a bit.

Happy birthday, Apple Macintosh

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