Old Heads: Tell me bout the good ole days

[MrCheeto]

What was it like to use your Mac back in the day?

I remember using my first computer in 1995. It was a Packard Bell and was the first time I ever saw a GUI. I played around in drawing apps and kid's games. I also learned to type. I believe I used an Apple IIGS in elementary school.

When I look at the computers that were "sensational" before then and cost multi-thousands of dollars, I have to wonder why. I can't quite comprehend the need for performance before the introduction of digital video and audio or the media-rich internet.

In 1985 or 1990, why would you choose to spend so much money on a computer? Why was one option better than the other? Did you really need another 10mhz? Was your life made easier by adding 6mb of RAM? Was there a time when a computer you bought one year made the computer from the prior year hilariously obsolete?

When I see the PowerPC Apple introductions, everybody is losing their minds over the performance. Did you ever witness a real-world scenario where a PowerMac G3 was really the only solution to your computing needs? Were they really super computers in comparison to the x86 Windows world?

As I've experienced a hundred vintage computers, the lines in their capabilities are utterly blurred. I can't imagine how an Intel 286 CPU clocked at 12.5mhz is any more or less practical or necessary than an Apple IIc Plus. It's all clunky kludgy claptrap that reminds me of the early attempts of man to fly.

I can imagine if your whole occupation required you to figure out how to make something happen precisely and quickly, but that's so hard to emulate today without the insight from the people that lived it. Just like how kids today may not be able to imagine how Tiger Electronics pocket games were fun, you just had to be there.

 

[eyoungren]

Well…my first computer was a TRS-80 CoCo. My dad brought it home in 1980 when I was 10. This was shortly after having already purchased a Tandy (Radio Shack) Pong console. Both, hooked up to the TV, so since the computer could do multiple games (via cartridge) that saw the most use.

I can only speak for our house, but computer use for anything serious didn't happen until the mid-1990s. I owned a Commodore 64 from 1985 onward and a Commodore 128 in my last year of high school (1989). At first, I played games. But by 1985 I had discovered Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and a lot of my use started to revolve around that. I was running my own BBS (part-time) in high school.

In 1990, I got a homebuilt 286 and a modem and continued to use that for BBSing. At that time, the big deal was baud rate for modems. We got from 1200bps to 9600bps fairly quickly. But I also discovered that the PC was good for word processing.

I got a 486 in 1992 and my first 1GB hard drive in 1993. By 1995 I owned a homebuilt AMD 586. By 1997 it was a Pentium. A collection at work was taken up to upgrade my ram to 4mb so I could run a game my wife (then my girlfriend) was getting me for my birthday.

It wasn't until around 2002 that I actually seriously started to care about mhz/ghz and ram. I tended to care more about hard drive capacity.

But since 1985, no matter what computer I've owned, the primary use has been to connect online. The computer is the one tool I have to go beyond my front door and engage with other people in other places.

 

[MajorFubar]

What you've got to remember is differences in vintage kit, which to you now seems relatively insignificant because it was just a couple of MHz here and there, were huge then and literally saved the same amount of time as upgrades do now. If you were a business and the new PC on the block enabled you to complete a particular task 25% faster than your current model, it wasn't too difficult to calculate if or when the investment in the new tech would pay for itself via increased productivity. Pretty much the same yardstick they would use now, albeit that the numbers were smaller.

And yes, tech got outdated way way quicker than it does now. I'm using an 11 year old iMac to run my home studio, which I've owned from nearly-new. That actually would have been unthinkable as recently as when my iMac itself was new. It replaced a seven year old PC laptop which was almost state of the art when it was new but was creaking when I put it out to pasture in 2011.

 

[satcomer]

My first self owned Mac (besides the ones in High school) Was in Army on Air Force tech store a Power Mac G4 tower with three PCI slots! Using it with America Online was chore but quoting America Online was trying to pull teeth out of your mouth! I was transferring to new assignment in the States and had to cancel! Finally talking to het boss I told him I was solider being transferred did let quit their service! I never want that stutation ever again with an ISP!

 

[Boyd01]

First computer was an Apple ][, it was one of the first - serial number 4546, purchased from the Computer Workshop of Pittsburgh on 6/22/1978 for $1225. I got the 16k version (instead of the 4k) so I could run floating point BASIC. The 4k version could only do integer BASIC, which was burned into ROM. You needed to load floating point into memory from a cassette tape. There was no floppy disk available yet, but I got one as soon as it came out.

Got an Apple //e at work later, and the business office got an Apple ///. Our finance director liked it so much, when he left to start his own small auto repair shop, he got one for himself. In 1985 we had an Apple IIgs at work, never really liked that one.

First Mac was a 512k "Fat Mac" in 1985. Also got an ImageWriter II printer and an Apple Hard Disk 20 - a huge 20MB! I remember being in awe about how much data it could hold and how fast it was, LOL. I had to send my Mac back in for an upgrade to a 512k Enhanced (512ke) in order to support the hard disk.

Looking at my notes, the 512k Mac was $1649, which was a 20% SUNY faculty discount. The hard disk was $1014 and the ImageWriter II was $437.50. All together, including sales tax and shipping it set me back $3259.52! The inflation calculator says that would be $8540 today! There have been endless Macs since then, would be afraid to total up the cost. First modular Mac was a IIcx around 1990. I got the Apple monochrome monitor because the color screen was just too expensive! First laptop was a PowerBook Duo 210 in 1993, that is still one of my all-time favorites.

Here's my daughter with the Mac 512k in 1986. Anybody know what that game is? Oregon Trail?

 

[Silencio]

When I was shopping for my first Mac in late 1992, I remember excessively sweating the details between the outgoing IIci and the brand new IIvx.

The IIci had been on sale for three years by that point. However, the CPUs was nearly identical to what was offered in the new IIvx: 25 MHz vs 32MHz. Then you would go down the line and see if there was a math coprocessor or not, and how much Level 2 and/or Level 3 cache was offered. What pushed me over the line for the older IIci was the system bus speed: 25 MHz for the older system versus 16 MHz for the newer one.

I made the right call, as the IIci had far more expansion and upgrade options and wasn't hobbled by the slower system bus. The IIvx has been historically viewed as one of Apple's bigger duds, while the IIci is considered one of the best Macintosh models ever made. I eventually upgraded that 25 MHz 68030 processor to a 50 MHz 68030, then an even faster 40 MHz 68040.

These are all infinitesimal numbers in the grand scheme of things today, but the percentage improvements in performance really added up.

 

[icanhazmac]

My first Apple was a //c, made a lot of money with that computer selling copies of hacked games, I seem to remember Strip Poker being the most popular!

As far as a Mac goes my school got a very early one, a 512 I think, in the Graphics department and I was the one the teacher chose to show him how to use it.

A few years later I was working tech support for a calendar/address book program that offered a PC and Mac version, I think the one we had was a Mac SE/30. Sadly this job sent me down the path of PCs until 2017.

 

[maflynn]

Like others, I started off with a TRS Color Computer, and eventually got a version of unix running it, which is fantastic given its limitations, tiny ram, dual floppy drive.

I moved on to the IBM PC, running dos, and I also used various flavors of Macintoshs, starting off with SE. What I found was limiting and problematic, was no CLI. With Windows still a ways off, I was unprepared to handle an OS that completely insulated the user from the actual workings of a computer. By then I was teaching myself assember and digging through the innards of computers. There was little digging on the Mac. What changed my opinion at the time, was Excel. I was using Lotus 123, and seeing/using Excel was a game changer.

I moved on to using Macs nearly full time with the Bondi Blue iMac, upgrading to various models as the years rolled on.

One of my early memories is going to the Boston computer society during one of their meetings where the Amiga was introduced, I was blown away at the power, and performance of such a machine. Sadly I never really got a chance to own one.

Another fond memory is going to computer shows, and clubs, back when this was all new, hobbyists and hackers (when that term wasn't all negative). Even talking with many phone phreakers who showed off their equipment and what they did.

Online activity was another fond memory, that screech, my first modem was a 150 baud modem, I thought I made it to the big time when I got a 2400 baud hayes modem. Online stuff for me at the time was accessing BBS

I still enjoy technology, and computers, but nothing can replace the level of excitement when you have an opportunity to jump in a brand new industry.

 

[dmr727]

I was 5 years old when my Dad brought home the original Macintosh. He was a computer guy so we had a TRS-80 Color Computer and a Compaq 'luggable' PC at the time. The Mac was a revelation because of the resolution of the display, and MacPaint blew my young mind - especially FatBits and Brush Mirrors. We continued to have both Macs and PCs in the house - first upgrading our 128K to a Plus, then later a IIcx, and then a PowerMac 7500 when I went off to college.

The IIcx was a big deal when my Dad brought it home. I believe it was a 5/80 configuration, and like @Boyd01 we had a greyscale monitor because color was too pricey. As it was I think my Dad spent well over $5K for the machine - over $11K in today's dollars. Around then he came home with a second hand LaserWriter, and that thing was amazing. Turning in my homework was a source of pride because all the other kids were printing their assignments from a dot matrix printer (or handwritten - computers at home weren't nearly as ubiquitous back then).

I enjoyed playing games on our PCs as well and remember the early versions of Windows for our 286 and later the 386. But in the late 80s the Mac IIcx was special in its own right - 640x480 at 256 colors (or in our case, grays) was pretty baller at a time when our PC was rocking EGA, and even the new VGA cards could only do 256 colors at 320x200. The Mac just felt like a different class of hardware.

 

[Bodhitree]

Let’s see. I recall having an Apple IIe at school, and learning to program in BASIC on it when I was 12. I think I startled the teachers by asking about Peek and Poke and the limits of structured programming. I was most interested in programming games, but got stuck on some of the tougher problems of implementing collision detection.

Fast forward to 1986, my father bought an Atari 1040ST as the household computer. I used it mostly for reports and a few games like Ultima IV, my school at the time was a lot less supportive of teaching computing. Instead I was doing Physics and English Lit. But it had a GUI, a mouse and could drive a colour display.

The first computer I owned myself was a 486-33 running MS-DOS, which I bought with some savings after I finished my studies. I used it mainly for games like Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Panzer General and Simon the Sorceror. This would have been in the early 1990’s. I remember what a pain it was to free enough base and extended memory for some of those games, you’d have to alter your boot configuration in order to load some device drivers into high memory if I remember right.

Then I started working with my mother and stepfather as freelance graphic designers, and that meant using Macs. We went through the tail end of the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC. We had a Performa for a while, used that to do some illustrated books and then invested in Power Macintoshes. I ended up buying a Power Macintosh 9500/120 as my first Mac, on which I taught myself to program in C++ and which I later sold when I moved full-time into games programming on PCs.

It was only very much later that I bought a Mac again, in 2011 when I bought a MacBook Air for writing, doing taxes, and all the little tasks. PCs are fine when you have to use them, but for my personal use I prefer a Mac — why own a grey box when you can own a thing of beauty and style?

 

[Silencio]

Online activity was another fond memory, that screech, my first modem was a 150 baud modem, I thought I made it to the big time when I got a 2400 baud hayes modem. Online stuff for me at the time was accessing BBS

150 baud! I don't recall ever seeing anything slower than 300 baud, which is what I started out with myself in the early 80s. I had to scrimp and save to buy a 1200 baud modem: an AppleCat ][ 212, truly the most coveted modem amongst Apple ][ users due to its proprietary compression algorithms that led to user-developed, proprietary file and disk transfer systems like Catsend and Diskfur. There were also AE lines (when you set up your copy of the ASCII Express terminal software to answer incoming calls) that any modem user could use, and traditional BBSes.

I'd still say my most clever and elegant bit of programming was the BBS system I wrote for the //e utilizing a modular design with the various code modules cached on a RAM disk to load seamlessly. I still have the 5.25" disks for it, but I'll never be able to track down the esoteric peripherals required to load and run it completely.

 

[Boyd01]

By then I was teaching myself assember and digging through the innards of computers. There was little digging on the Mac.

Shortly after I got my Mac in 1985, a company named Tenon Intersystems introduced Mach Ten, a version of BSD unix that ran as a task under the Macintosh operating system. I had just started learning unix and c with BSD running on the University's VAX 11/780, so it was especially cool to be able to do most of the same things on the Mac (instead of logging in with my 1200 baud dialup modem which was an expensive long distance phone call from my rural home).

In the 1990's, before Apple introduced OS X, I used Mach Ten to run a mail and web server for my company, connected to a 64k leased line to PSInet.

A few years later, AT&T was blowing out the remainder of their unix PC stock - a really innovative product that never really caught on. I got a top-spec machine - the 3b1 - which (IIRC) had 3 MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive with a Motorola 68010 CPU. That was a very cool machine in its day (although it ran System V unix, which was pretty strange, coming from BSD).

I wrote a little windowing package that ran on the 3b1 - it was almost trivially simple, but a nice alternative to the built-in user interface since you could have multiple sessions in small windows, it's mentioned in FAQ 4.4 here.

Apparently some Hollywood studios bought a bunch during that blowout sale to use as props. You will see them in a bunch of TV shows and films from that era, I guess designers liked the futuristic wedge-shaped design.

 

[maflynn]

I'd still say my most clever and elegant bit of programming was the BBS system I wrote for the /

Yeah, while not BBS focused, but I wrote a library system, so that people could log into a PC, search for some shareware and copy it to a floppy disk. I'm pretty proud of that accomplishment, I did it in a mixture of C and assembler. This was a dos based program, so I had that going for me, i.e., not worrying about windows, but I did have to deal with memory issues that Dos imposed.

 

[MrCheeto]

I'm grateful I got to read these throughout the work day.

So it seems a lot of people were using their computers at that time just for Usenet type message boards?

And yes, tech got outdated way way quicker than it does now. I'm using an 11 year old iMac to run my home studio, which I've owned from nearly-new. That actually would have been unthinkable as recently as when my iMac itself was new.

When I was repairing PowerBook G4's and teaching the owner how to work around Flash Player with FlashBlock and Flash alternatives, I was impressed that 3-year-old laptops were still going "strong" *cough wheeze*.

I'm currently on a 2012 MBA for my main. I bought it in 2013 for $500 and I'd say if I threw it in the trash, I got my worth. Actually my other two portables were found in the trash. Spoiled rich kids just pitch these things every year when they get the new one.
The day I watched Steve Jobs unveil the iPad, the A4 chip made me drool. I equated it to a PowerMac G4...in your hand! Most impressively, it had no fan. That got my imagination turning as I dreamed that one day there would be a MacBook Air based on the Apple chip that would have no fan at all, the iPhone's Retina Display pixel density, and a magical port that would do it all so there was no need for ethernet, FireWire, etc. and it could be used for docking.
Well I waited and waited and now...damn it was worth it. I'm getting an M1 MBA as soon as the refresh causes them to depreciate.

Got an Apple //e at work later, and the business office got an Apple ///. Our finance director liked it so much, when he left to start his own small auto repair shop, he got one for himself. In 1985 we had an Apple IIgs at work, never really liked that one.

What does a repair shop need an Apple III for?

The IIvx has been historically viewed as one of Apple's bigger duds, while the IIci is considered one of the best Macintosh models ever made.

And what made one better than the other as far as for the user? I understand lack of expandability but was it just software support? Kinda reminds me of the WindowsME/2000 disaster, you just had to experience it to get it.

I moved on to the IBM PC, running dos, and I also used various flavors of Macintoshs, starting off with SE. What I found was limiting and problematic, was no CLI. With Windows still a ways off, I was unprepared to handle an OS that completely insulated the user from the actual workings of a computer.

I like that little insight. Maybe I could relate since the "locked down" iOS has been threatening to bleed over into macOS with a similar attempt to make things "easy" by making them "stupid".

Then I started working with my mother and stepfather as freelance graphic designers, and that meant using Macs. We went through the tail end of the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC. We had a Performa for a while, used that to do some illustrated books and then invested in Power Macintoshes.

I'm curious how 68k machines were used for graphics at that time. How do a few hundred (in width) grayscale pixels add up to something print-worthy or useful?

 

[bradl]

I'm grateful I got to read these throughout the work day.

So it seems a lot of people were using their computers at that time just for Usenet type message boards?

Usenet? That barely started around 1991/1992.

I didn't get my first computer until 1982, when my parents bought an Apple IIe for me. They both knew that for some reason with them coming up, that I should learn about it because it was going to be the wave of the future. But like all kids (me being 8 at the time), and already seeing the success of both the Atari 2600 and Intellivision and the oncoming of the Colecovision (read: the first console wars), all I wanted to do was play games on it. That and those games notwithstanding, I did learn a fair bit on it: I Typed many a book report/paper on it (we got 80-column card to go with the computer, the Imagewriter printer, and a 110baud modem, learned LOGO (one of the first languages that kids could learn), and learned DOS and ProDOS.

I didn't really touch a Mac until 1989, when I joined my school's journalism and yearbook staff as that is what they used for the school's newspaper and yearbook. Those were Mac SEs, which was fun, as I got introduced to Aldus Pagemaker (before Adobe bought them).

I'm curious how 68k machines were used for graphics at that time. How do a few hundred (in width) grayscale pixels add up to something print-worthy or useful?

How did m68k machines get used for graphics? While everything we had was either grayscale (or worse; green/black/white), if we had everything in a publishable format, if we included the images with what was submitted to a publisher, they would take the layout from PageMaker or Microsoft Write, along with the images, and print out everything in color.

It wasn't until 1992 and being a freshman in college that I saw any type of color Mac, with the LC IIs or Powerbook Duos, where MS Word was primarily used. All there was available was Word, Excel, PageMaker, and a few others. This was around the time that the Internet was in its infancy, where you'd have WAIS, FTP sites, and USENET. Want to connect to another server? Telnet.. but you better have a valid login! Search Engines? That's where ARCHIE would come in. Browsers? Good luck with that; Gopher was your tool. It wouldn't be for another year before the first web browser would be released, which would have been NSCA Mosaic.

Macs made that easy with having decent GUIs for those, but most of those were all Unix based. If you had a Mac, you were lucky, as PCs started to rule at this time, as it was cheaper to get that with Windows 3.1 and a 2400baud modem than paying double the price for a Mac.

However, the good part about back then was that you got to see where the GUI came from, as both Windows System Software 6.x and 7.x all came from X and various Unix-based Window Managers. Macs helped with that, however you could tell they were losing the market to Windows, let alone even Linux, because there was no real way to help with developing the OS. PCs had Visual Basic, Visual C, Visual C++, but Macs really didn't have much. However, the big thing that helped to save Macs, let alone Apple was Apple buying NeXT. That got them the underlying Unix OS that they could use, similar to Windows (at the time, Windows ran on top of DOS), and X (which runs on top of Unix).

Those days were fun, as you could learn the basics of one OS, and it could apply to the other, as while their architectures were different, the basics were applicable across the board. The same applied to Macs, which helped me get into the modern versions of OS X.

Honestly, I'd love to go back to the 80s and early 90s, because those days were fun!

BL.

 

[eyoungren]

Online activity was another fond memory, that screech, my first modem was a 150 baud modem, I thought I made it to the big time when I got a 2400 baud hayes modem. Online stuff for me at the time was accessing BBS

I had a 300 baud modem for my C64. My mom was nice enough to get me a second line to use strictly for the computer. That is until I ran up a $300 phone bil.

In 1990 when I got my first PC, it came with a 1200 baud Hayes modem. I eventually got a 2400. Those were neat, with their red LEDs and silver metal bodies. Back then I knew a SysOp who ran a genealogy BBS that had two or three lines. He was selling me the old Hayes equipment as he upgraded (the first PC I got too). He eventually switched to US Robotics, which were these giant, black metal modems with flashy red LEDs. It was right around that era where bps speeds topped out.

The SysOp was in his mid to late 60s in the early 90s and both he and his wife were not in the greatest of health. So after a while I lost track of them. But a lot of my computer habits and knowledge I picked up from him. He insisted that I learn and understand MS-DOS and how all the hardware worked before he would sell me my computer.

 

[eyoungren]

How did m68k machines get used for graphics? While everything we had was either grayscale (or worse; green/black/white), if we had everything in a publishable format, if we included the images with what was submitted to a publisher, they would take the layout from PageMaker or Microsoft Write, along with the images, and print out everything in color.

One of the features of QuarkXPress was a proxie method. I do not recall what Quark called it, but to save on ram and disk space you'd import a low res image (usually grayscale), make your adjustments and placement and then you'd designate what higres print image the document was supposed to use for printing. You'd then collect all the images and the document and your printer would output with the hires images.

I think that feature was gone by QXP 6.

 

[eyoungren]

So it seems a lot of people were using their computers at that time just for Usenet type message boards?

I have never been on a Usenet board in my life. I started with the BBS that was run by the user group I was a part of and then went from there.

Bulletin board system - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Forums, such as this one, are a natural extension of that.

 

[Bodhitree]

I'm curious how 68k machines were used for graphics at that time. How do a few hundred (in width) grayscale pixels add up to something print-worthy or useful?

By the time I was using it, QuarkXPress was at version 3.2 and it was the dominant DTP solution. We already had colour CRT monitors by then. You worked with low-res images to position art on the page, next to text, and you’d then save an encapsulated PostScript file for printing. All this would go to the printer on SyQuest cartridges, big square magnetic cartridges which would store 88 MB of data, this was in the days before burning CDs became viable. Occasionally the printer would take the original Quark documents with fonts and high-res images separately.

You’d also work with a scanning facility. Often you would go out and find art books and magazines which would contain pictures, there was a lot of trawling through second-hand bookshops, and you’d have to cut them out and have them scanned in big expensive scanners. Then you’d have to find out who owned the rights to the image and arrange to pay for the use. Home flatbed scanners just started to come in when I left, these things all used SCSI and we had PowerPC macs by then.

But things were slow. Opening a big file in Photoshop meant you could go make a cup of tea, there would be a progress bar onscreen for quite a few common operations. I remember a series of Photoshop plug-ins called Kai’s Power Tools, which were varied and flexible and got used a fair bit.

 

[maflynn]

I have never been on a Usenet board in my life. I started with the BBS

Same here, I never connected with any sort of Usenet community, I was into BBS. I also remember Compuserve.

Also does anyone remember Prodigy, the online endeavor partly started by Sears - talk about ill fitting, LOL

 

[Boyd01]

What does a repair shop need an Apple III for?

Business owners need computers. Mainly, he was running an accounting package from Great Plains Software, the same he had used at our company before he left. I'm sure he found other uses for it as well.

Usenet? That barely started around 1991/1992.

Sorry, you are way off there. I started participating around 1986. The university didn't have a live ARPAnet connection at that time, it had a UUCP connection to another BSD unix system at cornell.edu with a dialup modem that transferred e-mail several times a day. That is how we participated in usenet, logging into the university's VAX 11/750 with a terminal (or terminal program).

"Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed from the general purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980."

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

archive.org

 

[stillcrazyman]

My first exposure to computing was in the early 80's in high school. We had a lab full of the TRS80 machines. I started to learn Basic and Fortran / Cobol. Didn't follow through with learning software, it just wasn't easy for me. I had a Texas Instruments TI99 as my first machine at home. I had never seen a Mac until my college years. I thought only rich people had them.
I was mostly into buying and building pc's until the mid 90's when I bought my first Mac. I recall it was a PowerMac 7100. I was fascinated by the voice recognition software.

I've had a Mac ever since then.

I've made a decent career out of supporting the hardware of a large school district. Not on my own of course, but part of large organization.

 

[eyoungren]

Same here, I never connected with any sort of Usenet community, I was into BBS. I also remember Compuserve.

Also does anyone remember Prodigy, the online endeavor partly started by Sears - talk about ill fitting, LOL

I had some favorite BBSes that I visited so when Compuserve and Prodigy (yes, I remember them) came around I was never interested. BBSes were free, those services were not.

Once they started mass producing their install CDs though I took advantage of the free drink coasters they were sending me. I still have a stack. At one point they were sending these things inside aluminum tins. A bit of sandpaper and water and all the paint comes off - and I have a nice set of tins.

 

[eyoungren]

My first exposure to computing was in the early 80's in high school. We had a lab full of the TRS80 machines. I started to learn Basic and Fortran / Cobol. Didn't follow through with learning software, it just wasn't easy for me. I had a Texas Instruments TI99 as my first machine at home. I had never seen a Mac until my college years. I thought only rich people had them.
I was mostly into buying and building pc's until the mid 90's when I bought my first Mac. I recall it was a PowerMac 7100. I was fascinated by the voice recognition software.

I've had a Mac ever since then.

I've made a decent career out of supporting the hardware of a large school district. Not on my own of course, but part of large organization.

I had a friend by the late 80s who had a Mac. Despite always hearing about Apple and how they changed the industry, I'd never seen a Mac until then. At least at that time, maybe you have a point about them being for rich people. My friend's family was at least upper middle class.

But, the Mac they had, had this small dinky grayscale screen. At home I had a full color Commodore 64 hooked up to a large monitor (large for the 1980s). And the games I played on the C64 looked (to me) better than what the Mac was running. So, while seeing that Mac was interesting, I never wanted one.

My mother taught computer science in public schools at the latter half of her career (first half was private schools). We had all makes and models of computers coming and going, except Macs.

 

[Bodhitree]

I’m surprised to see so many people got into computers for BBS’es and Usenet. I never really used them, I was more into computer magazines until the first web browsers came out. I remember they had these CDs full of shareware and freeware, every month I went digging through them to see what was new.

My father was a software engineer in the banking world, and he gave me the advice, whatever you do, don’t do software. Of course, what happened, I ended up doing software.