Happy birthday, Apple Macintosh

Tre

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

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

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

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

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

and so the hipsterdom began.

lee4hmz

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.