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Apple's Macintosh Turns 25 Years Old Today

Wow 25 years. I feel I've watched my life go by with Mac updates...

Dad hauled home a Mac Pro, when I was little and it was cool, but I was little, so didn't take much to impress me. Of course, HE was super impressed!

Next came the SE, which was awesome. I played Banzai on that for hours and figured out the timing for mass slaughter.

SE/30 that was actually an awesome computer and became mine, which I used through high school, after the fam upgraded to an LCIII.

The LCIII was sweet because it had a color screen! yeehaw!

A PowerMac 7500 which was sweet later in high school because I could actually play some 'real' games on it like Pathways into Darkness.

I got spoiled with a PowerMac 8500 for college and it was the most amazing thing I ever owned. I played everything on that like WarCraft 2, Descent, etc. I wrote a couple papers too I think.

Next came the iMac G3 Lime. It was pretty cool too, because it was so much smaller than the 8500 setup. Pretty much what I remember about that computer was OS 8 and 9 and StarCraft sucking my life away.

iBook G3 600. First laptop ever! That thing was awesome, but I didn't get to leverage its wireless capabilities. Still on dial up at the time. But portabality rocked!

iBook G4. Sucked. Big. Time. All kinds of problems.

Downgrade to PowerMac G3 Blue and White Tower. Upgraded its CPU and folded for a long time on it.

Upgrade to G5 1.6! Wow, what a great machine, for all the reasons we loved the G5. Nice case, fast for the time and easy upgradability.

Added a PowerBook G4 12" 1.33. I still miss this little guy. What a great little computer. I just couldn't justify its costs so sold it on eBay. Sad day. Stuck with the single desktop G5.

PC's. Not much to say.

MBP 2.2Ghz Santa Rosa, where I am today. Really nice computer, except for the ELP Problem.

Weird to see my life in terms of computer equipment.
 
Happy birthday Mac!

While I started out with an Apple II in Kindergarten, first grade was when I became familiar with Macs - starting with the venerable Mac Plus (we had 25 machines networked via phonenet to a Classic running AppleShare). Ah the days of Monochrome 9" monitors, boot disks and slim applications!

My first Mac was a Performa 450 my dad bought in 1994, followed by a Quadra 650, PowerMac 7200, G4/450 dual, G4 Tibook (which only died last month) and G5 1.8 which I am currently writing this on :)

It's amazing how the technology, interface and design has evolved over 25 years, and it's exciting to speculate about where it will lead in the future.

Now let's all have some cake! :)
 
Interesting to see these videos, especially how the narrator describes the Mac's functions. In the first one, where the user transfers the drawing into the memo, I found it odd that he was able to cut the image and then quit MacPaint without getting a warning dialog. It's also strange that he used Cut instead of Copy, although that could be because Cut has an obvious effect that you can see on the screen.

For those of you who are too young to have had much experience with previous desktop computers, it's worth noting that aside from the mouse, menus, and icons, one of the Mac's revelations was its sharp black-and-white display. I used an Apple II+ to write for almost five years before getting a Mac. As good as the Apple II+ was, characters were still fuzzy representations of what I later might see on paper. The Mac, with its sharp black text on a white background, was much closer to the final result and a lot easier to work with.
 
We had Apple ][s in Jr. High School, and I purchased a clone ][+ when graduating high school, just after the Mac was introduced. Then purchased a Mac LC (1990), 6300 (1996), and a slew of Macs ever since. Apple has always gotten better, and it is amazing to see where it started.
 
I started with C64. Apple II was too expensive and not so widespread. I moved on to Amiga and that was the best computer experience ever.

As Amiga perished, I had no alternative but to go PC way. And PCs were bad back then. Macs have matured considerably by then (they got color, wow!) but they were still over my budget.

When PCs got a complete makeover with Windows 95, I was pleasantly surprised. Win95 was still not quite there yet, though.

Then Macs finally came into my life. It was Macintosh IIfx at first, then came Quadra, then PowerMac 8100! Now, that Mac was my pet and it worked perfectly! From there I moved on to my first G3, then G4 and now it's Intel.

I was one of the early adopters of Mac OS X. Some die hard Apple fans didn't like it back then. To me, it was the Amiga days all over again. I loved it! I have high hopes for Snow Leopard to disperse the final bits of nostalgia I have over my Amiga days, but already - this, where we are now is completely amazing! I love having a Mac, and there are at least 20 people that I know of, who have bought Macs because of me constantly promoting Mac experience.

That's now and the future looks bright. So, happy birthday Mac!
 
arn said:
I was an Apple II guy growing up. Apple //c, Apple //gs. Apple discontinued the Apple II line (to my dismay at the time), so I got a Mac IIsi for college. Later upgraded to a PowerMac 7500. PowerMac G3, I think next. PowerMac G4 Dual 800. Now on a Mac Pro 2.6GHz Dual Xeon.

figured I'd share. :)

arn
Click to expand...


Started out myself on an Apple II+ (48K Ram, 143K single floppy, DOS 3.3) that my folks got when I was a high school freshman. Still have it, but haven't turned it on in years. (Learned to program from The Applesoft Tutorial manual; still the friendliest bit of technical documentation ever written.) Used to ride my bike to the local computer stores every chance I got when the LISA came out; it was so new it took me awhile to figure out it really was easier to use but it was out of reach due to being so expensive. It was a much more fundamental advance over the Xerox Star than legions of MS fans want to give credit for these days. And then the Mac came out when I was working part time at the local store... I wanted one so bad, but college had to come first. One thing I wish the Mac still had was the built in interactive tutorial guide for new users that assumed you knew nothing to start with.

I was installing computer next works at my church when Appletalk was introduced - it was fascinating to plug those Macs together with so little effort and show folks they could just move files to each other's computers without having to walk down the hall with floppy disk like their PC using counterparts. ;-) Switcher came out about that time too and then got officially incorporated into the Mac system and you could actually have more than one application open at a time (not just utilities) and switch between them, later to become MultiFinder. Those were the days of System and Finder being separate from each other and on separate upgrades, finally consolidated with System 6.

Back in college, it was the days before the world wide web and the only internet connectivity was in the campus computer labs. There were no internet connection in the dorms and almost nobody had a computer in their room. We did have one community room in the dorm that had several computers for shared use without having to go across campus. Since they were all Macs, that room was forever known as "the Mac room", NOT "the computer room", even long after we stopped using it for that.

In grad school I got to admin the department Mac network and persuaded the faculty to let us upgrade to System 7, which was a huge revolution with the ability to actually see your files on one Mac while sitting at another one!


Sorry for the rambling, just couldn't resist reminiscing some of my 'Apple' moments after reading this thread.
 
Happy 1/4 of a Century for Mac...

Happy Birthday Mac!, But .....I'm still waiting for the iMac upgrade so I can make my first mac purchase!
 
Mac RULES!!! (Original)
MacPro RULES!!!
MacBook RULES!!!
iMac RULES!!!
iPod RULES!!!
iPhone RULES!!!

I can't wait whats next on the assembly line?

I would love to see the following products come out next.

iMacPro (a mini tower version of MacPro)
iPhone Nana
iPod Touch HD (250 GB, 500 GB hard drive)
iPod Touch Nana (8GB, 16 GB Flash Memory)
iTablet
iMacX (combine Mac Mini, AppleTV, and Game Console with a built in GeForce 3D; play all those games on apps store and new ones design to compete against xbox and ps3)

:D
 
Macminiintel said:
The main reason why LISA failed was its cost, it was a $10,000 system About $20,000 in todays money. The Mac was much more reasonably priced at $2,495
Click to expand...

I dunno. A fully outfitted IBM PC system for business could be upwards of $8,000.

I think the Lisa didn't sell because managers saw GUIs as something to play with, not do business stuff with. And Apple didn't really advertise its existence.

Managers were right about one thing: being able to make pretty documents easier, just led to taking more time with documents. I read a study that found that making business letters took longer than in the old take-dictation-and-type-it days... simply because it was easier to go back and edit it over and over again until the author was satisified it was perfect.

Anyway, very large businesses might have a Lisa in a special room for special use, just as some do with color laser printers today.
 
chaosconan said:
Just looking at that original Macintosh 128KB is fantastic. It's still revolutionary. I can't say the same thing about a PC. :D
Click to expand...
I beg to differ!

The first 'notebook' computer, as we now know them, was an NEC running MSDOS:

open.jpg


chaosconan said:
iPhone Nana
Click to expand...
Is this a grandparent friendly product?
kdarling said:
The digital age made work stricter in many ways. Back in the days of inaccurate windup watches, it was not unusual for people to be five minutes fast or slow to everything, for instance.
Click to expand...
Whaddya mean, back in the day? I'm still five minutes slow to do everything... :)
 
I haven't had a Mac for nearly as long as many people have. I got my first computer, a used Toshiba Satellite PC, about 6 years ago. All it does is play one game (Red Alert) and has an extremely old version of Microsoft office. I have been using Macs at my school for 9 years and finally got one three years ago. I still have the PC that is now 11 years old, and it still works today.

Happy Birthday to the Mac and long live the Mac!
 
My history

The first computer my family owned was a dos-based one. We basically only used it to play Wheel of Fortune on. :D Then, we got a Windows 95 Compaq desktop. In 2003, we got a Dell Dimension 4600 running Windows XP. Then in February 2007 I got my first laptop - a Compaq Presario F700 running Vista.

~Now comes the good part~

I got interested in Apple and Macs a little less than a year ago. I loved their awesome modern design. The OS seemed much cooler than Windows. After a long time of drooling on Apple.com, I finally got my first Mac just a few days ago. I bought my Spanish Teacher's snow iBook G3. I hope to get a Unibody soon, also. I have turned a lot of people in school from PC to Mac.

Apple ][ forever ;):apple:
 
The only Mac I've owned is my trusty 12" G4 iBook. It's over three years old now, and still running well.

Frankly I don't know what I'll do when it finally gives up - Apple's new laptops are overpriced here in NZ now (with the exchange rates).

Hopefully Apple will innovate once again. I really don't think they've done much in recent years - nothing truly original anyway. Just a lot of very clever marketing.
 
PCMacUser said:
I beg to differ!

The first 'notebook' computer, as we now know them, was an NEC running MSDOS:

open.jpg



Is this a grandparent friendly product?
Click to expand...

Nothing to differ about. I never said anything about first notebook or anything to do with FIRST. My word was revolutionary.

And yes grandparent friendly for iPhone Nano.
 
PCMacUser said:
I beg to differ!
[...]
The first 'notebook' computer, as we now know them, was an NEC running MSDOS:
[...]
Click to expand...

Actually, I think the title of 'first laptop' belongs to the original GRiD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiD_Compass
Definitely an object of geek lust back in the day...

One might be able to make a case for the Radio Shack pocket computer:
[http://oldcomputers.net/trs80pc1.html
(I even had a friend who owned one! Not all that impressive in person really, even at the time.)

Arguably Apple's first portable (but not really a 'laptop') was the Apple IIc with the optional LCD display, though it came a couple years after the first GRiD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc
 
BTW, does anybody know how many different Mac models there have been? (I think I lost count over a decade ago. :eek:)
 
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