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Mac users: Did you grow up with mac?

I did have a Delta Gold Dos machine in about 1987-88 but we bought a used Macintosh SE which started my journey with Apple products.
 
I grew up with System 7/OS 8 on a Performa - we never had a Windows machine in our house.

Of course, this meant I was the only one at school who didn't know how to use Windows (I was about 7 😛 ).

Safe to say that as it's almost a requirement to know Windows now, I'm fairly proficient at it. Still stick to OS X at home though, thankfully!
 
Antares said:
Under the older definition, dialing directly into the information systems, including using BBS’s, etc would be considered “using the internet.” It’s just a different kind of internet than our “modern internet.”
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Where does that slippery slope end then? By the definition you seem to be proposing, Samuel Morse was "using the internet" when he invented the telegraph?!? It was just an early form of internet e-mail, right?

"The internet" is a series of standards that are designed for interoperability. Before the arrival of the commercial internet, the online world consisted of many proprietary systems that didn't always work together.

Prior to 1989 the internet was only available in limited government and educational institutions, so no one would ever have considered a BBS as "part of the internet." In fact, I heard plenty of comparisions when the internet was first going commercial that "the internet" was just like CompuServe or AOL, but with less content.

Some of us lived thorough this time period as adults and were active participants on local BBSes and the internet at the birth of the commercial internet. We aren't coming at this as something we learned about, but something we experienced directly. So, please don't try to convince people like ElectronGuru and myself that our direct experience was somehow different that it actually was. (FWIW The World, previously mentioned above, was my ISP for a short while, and I can still find my @world.std.com address on spam lists).

You appear to be mixing up two very different things:

A physical BBS as may have existed in the 1980s and a BBS service as may have existed once the internet started to become a commercial reality post 1989. They aren't the same thing.

B
 
Nope.

TI-994A
Commodore 64
Gateway Desktop with a Celeron upgraded to a Pentium
HP Laptops (3)

Min 2010 MacBook Pro 13" which I still have. Upgrading to 8GB this week. Maybe SSD soon.
 
Born in 1989, and growing up in the 90s, my parents had several high-end Mac models they did their work on. The first one I used was an iMac G3 they bought in 1998. Once they finished working on there they let me go on for internet as long as i did everything i need to. When I started high school, I got a 17" PowerBook G4. I have used but NEVER owned any Windows machines in my life. (unless Intel Macs count due to their Windows capability)
 
Intelligent said:
Almost everyone i meet, has had at least one windows pc, like EVERYONE, even on the internet, why is it so rare to have only had mac/apple computers? Did you grow up with Mac/apple computers?
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Nope, always had windows PC until I bought my first and only iMac back in 2008, brand new, now I have the imac, a used macbook and ipads.
 
Got my first Mac in 2013.

Used Apple PC's when I was kid in the late 80's and early 90's but was a really a Windows user from 1995 - 2012
 
First time I ever used a Mac was at school, this was the Macintosh Classic / PowerMac era. My school was 95% Mac resources and the only PC's we had were dusty 386's (which were old even then!) in the IT lab.

I always find it funny that every school/college/uni I've been to that ran Windows PCs always crashed several times a day and never worked properly... but my schools Mac network always worked flawlessly. I'm not even sure if we ever had/needed an IT guy to look after it! 😉

But when I left school in 1999 there still existed no Apple stores, the only machines available were Windows PCs.. and considering that back then the old myth of 'not much software available for Macs' actually had a shred of truth to it.

So I became a Windows guy for a long time and all through uni until I went to do my masters in film editing which required me to have a Mac, at the time I was thinking 'What am I going to do with that?', 'Well, I can just sell it after my course is over!', but when I got it I realised just how much I'd succumbed to all the myths and I couldn't believe how wrong I was!

The experience was great, it must have only took me less than a day to figure it all out, install all my stuff and migrate all my files/folders/email accounts incredibly easily..

Once I realised I hadn't needed to use my tower desktop PC in 6 months I sold the thing and I've now been a Mac user for about 7 years and never had a single problem with my Macs! Never been happier, not a chance I would go back to Windows, I just have no use for it and whenever I am forced to use a Windows machine I'm reminded about just how frustrating it is to use! 😀
 
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I started out on windows xp, then gravitated towards mac, then back to pc for my "Edgey teenage gamer years" now i'm gravitating back towards mac as I approach my 20's
 
My first computer was an Apple II.

Used a variety of computers since then. My work requires Windows and Linux. At home I'm all Mac.
 
Micky Do said:
Yes

The original Mac was first computer I used, when studying at university back in 1985. Twenty years later, as a university teacher, I bought my first computer, the original 2005 Mac Mini.

I had little call to use a computer during the intervening years, though as an itinerant farm worker for many years, I did adopt e-mail quite early, using internet cafes. To me a computer was a computer, and I had no idea or interest in what OS they used.
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Going back a bit further, I grew up without so much as a calculator or a TV. Of an evening we often used to play card games such as cribbage and five hundred, which required quite a bit of mental addition and subtraction. Also at school we learned the "times tables" for multiplication, and had to deal with pounds, shillings and pence for currency. As a result I became quite proficient at mental arithmetic.

During my first stint at university, doing an under-grad diploma in the mid-70's. I had to do a trial, which included doing an analysis of variance on a mainframe computer. That involved writing out the data to be analysed on a special form, which was then put on punch cards to be fed into the computer. I still have them stashed away somewhere, I think.
 
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Nope not at all.

I was only born in 1984.

So grew up with PC in school and college.

Tried and loved "fly-a-kite OSX" skin for XP but once service pack 3 for XP came out it no longer ran.

Only got my first mac little over 6 months ago, G4 iBook.

Since then massed a collection of ten machines but not all work.

Since the swap will not go back.
However I work for a computer retail/repair shop and windows much more common so still deal with windows.

My machine for work is a macbook though.
 
Started out with a Commodore VIC-20, then Amiga 500, then onto Dos/Windows system (386/486/AMD K6/Pentium II/Pentium III/Pentium 4 etc etc). Started with using Mac in college, but really got into Mac's with OS X on x86 release and being able to have it be basically Unix style x86 system. First owned Mac was a gen1 Mac Mini, but been 100% Mac for around 8 years now.
 
Intelligent said:
Almost everyone i meet, has had at least one windows pc, like EVERYONE, even on the internet, why is it so rare to have only had mac/apple computers? Did you grow up with Mac/apple computers?
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I grew up watching my dad use Dos - we had an old 286 with Windows 1.x? but it didn't get used much. I played Aces of the Pacific (Sierra) on Dos until Windows 3.1 came around. My first computer growing up was a 200 Mhz Windows 95 machine with a 200mb partition (wasn't REALLY mine but my dad let me have my own login).

I had neighbors down the street with old Apple machines and my grandparents had Apple computers but they wouldn't let me touch them because they were expensive and they didn't want me to mess them up. Always figured Mac was for the super rich growing up - I loved the look, the OS look, text readability, and everything about Apple but my entire youth was spent on Windows NT, 95, 98, 2000, XP, and 7. Got my first Mac in 2011 - a 13' Macbook Air. Kept it for a few years before selling it for a Windows 10 laptop (instantly regretted it).

Went full Mac last year - (Mac Mini with external SSD for home machine and a 11' Macbook Air for laptop). Very happy with it (wife is too - uses her Air with a dual monitor setup at home).
 
As I’m in my 70s, my first computer was my dad’s slide rule...

The oldest “Mac” I ever had in the house was a Lisa that my nephew found in a dumpster outside his school and left here for a bit because he was renovating his place. That Lisa had many more miles on it apparently, once he scrounged up a few replacement parts.

The first computer I bought was a Compaq “luggable” in the early 80s, it had a couple floppy disk drives and weighed north of 25 pounds, ran Compaq DOS 1.x and cost me in today’s dollars a couple grand more than I paid for my most recent used car, I think. It was rated as 95% compatible with MS-DOS 1.x but I had no problems running any software of the times on it.

Anyway back in early 1980s' bucks it ran about $3k and some of my friends thought I was nuts.

Then I bought a Mac512k in 1985 and my friends declared me certifiably nuts. But it didn’t stop any of them from playing with the MacPaint program when they got a chance.

I’ve bought Apple gear ever since then except for a Toshiba laptop I had for awhile and a cheap Tandy box I bought and left up here. That was after I bought my fixer-upper place, so we’d have something to play Zork on during weekends when we got tired of pulling down plaster and lath during renovations. Always a question whether two plastic garbage bags were enough to put around that Tandy while we were wearing masks and raising serious dust all over the place. Somehow it suffered all those indignities in agreeable silence, and for all I know it might still be upstairs in the back of some closet LOL.

Anyway because of the many years I spent commuting a couple times a week between a NYC apartment and my place up here, I gravitated to laptops for portability and still prefer them today. I like the data to follow me around instead of my having to go sit down in front of a desktop machine. Also we get power outages in the boondocks that can take awhile to resolve, a laptop in use doesn't care about that "for awhile" and if "awhile" stretches out too far, there's always the car to recharge it! So laptops and mobile devices remain my choices now.

Currently I’m using a couple Apple-refurb mid-2012 MBPs I bought not that long ago because I still like having an internal optical drive. Next stop: 15” MBP but not this cycle.
 
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Nope. My first computer was an Atari 400 in 1981. My last Atari computer was an Atari Falcon030 that I purchased in 1992. Atari quit the computer business in 1994. I bought my first Mac in 1995.
 
Intelligent said:
Nice, i never have had a windows pc either.

Did you get the 128k?
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I waited for the 512k and accoutred it w/ external 400k drive and ImageWriter. Friends had ][s but I was the first to take the leap after having researched and waited for some time.

I have an HP laptop for Visio and Project, and owned a different one ages ago, and have had Win rigs for work, laptops but primary computer has been a Mac.

512k (NOT extended)
SE
IIsi
pb520
pb/G3
q750
<couple minis in there; still have a 2010 or 2011>
mid-2011 iMac

I had such a boner for the Iici; we had one at work and if Apple came out w/ something similar now for a reasonable price, would jump all over it. Eyes failing, so retina means naught to me; I've got monitors that are great.
 
I've never used a Windows PC, always used Macs. The only Windows PC I've owned is the Toshiba Satellite L45 (or something like that). It was handed to me free so I ended up giving it away recently. Other than that, I have always used Macs.
 
Intelligent said:
Almost everyone i meet, has had at least one windows pc, like EVERYONE, even on the internet, why is it so rare to have only had mac/apple computers? Did you grow up with Mac/apple computers?
Click to expand...

No, I grew up with an Commodore 64 instead 🙂

I wish more people gre p with Mac's but all u hear are people (like me) who switched from Widows to Mac. Probably only those that live in the Apple world who have never used a PC at home....

That would be like a shock to the rest of the internet or something. Although i the same boat as "i've alays used a Chome book* *silence*
 
My dad was a computer hobbiest in the 80s and 90s, although he also depended on them heavily for his home tax return business. His first was a Tandy 1000, and over the years I got his hand-me-downs as he replaced computers(they'd usually been decently well upgraded by the time I got them).

We did have some Apple IIs at school, but they were primarily booted directly into educational software. Our computer lab had Compaq all in one 486s(I still have one kicking around here somewhere that I got when they upgraded).

I didn't use a Macintosh again until high school, when I was subjected to using iMac G3s. Between their tiny keyboards, hockey puck mice, and propensity to shut down at inopportune times I hated them(and now wish that I could go back to when they got rid of them and grab the colors I don't have). There was also a G3 AIO that was used for the library card catalog, but I never used it.

In college, we had one computer lab on campus that had a couple of old graphite towers in the back of it. Somewhere along the way, it was imparted to me that they could print for free, so I would occasionally use them for that.

Aside from that, I didn't really use Macs until I was in the middle of an important graduate school project and my Windows computer died on me. A friend loaned me a Mac(late '08 Aluminum Macbook), I used it for two weeks, and then went out and bought my own 13" Macbook Pro the day after I'd passed my research seminar. That was in the spring of 2012, and I've been a Mac nut since then.
 
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