My first Apple was a //e, purchased in 1984; how I loved it so.
I was just 4 when we got it, and I used the hell out of it - to this day my handwriting is atrocious but I can type 90wpm because I typed every school assignment I ever had (in MultiScribe - props to anyone who remembers that word processor!). It had an 80-column/128KB card, duo-disk 5 1/4" drive unit, and a Grappler+ parallel interface.
In 1988 I got my first experience with Macs and the internet (Bitnet, really), using a 1200 baud Apple Cat on a Mac Plus at school to dial into the local university's IBM mainframe and hang out on Bitnet RELAY (which would later evolve into IRC) - at the time, the notion of chatting with people around the world in near-real-time for "free" made me giddy.
I owned a succession of PC's over the next few years (the beloved Apple //e was finally given away in 1994 or so) but when I got into college I managed to pick up an (already way-obsolete by 1995) Mac SE/30. I was beginning to get into UNIX and ended up running NetBSD on it - it freaked people out when they'd try and sit down to use my Mac only to discover a text-mode login prompt!
I lugged that SE/30 around for a year (in a swank Apple carrying case dating from the pre-powerbook era) until its analog board finally gave out, and ended up replacing it with a NeXTstation that I bought for $270 in 1996 - at the time I was taking a class in digital music synthesis where much of our classwork required using the crusty old '030-based Cube in the synth lab. It was worth spending a few hundred bucks to have a faster machine at home to work on.
I loved NEXTSTEP, and sold that NeXTstation it to a friend a year later in order to upgrade to a NeXTstation TurboColor with a NeXT Laser Printer(both of which I still have!). That TurboColor was my sole machine for the next 3 years, until I broke down in 2000 and bought a used Thinkpad because Omniweb 2.7 on a 33 MHz 68040 was no longer cutting it as a web surfing platform!
I've owned a succession of PC laptops (and briefly, a desktop) since then, mostly running Linux, but all the while I'd been tinkering with OS X whenever I could get my hands on it. (My girlfriend of almost 2 years had a 600 MHz ibook until recently) Finally, I could wait no longer - I needed a new desktop and the $849 refurb deal on the 1.25 GHz emac w/ superdrive was too good to pass up. It's due to arrive tuesday, and I couldn't be more excited.
-vga4life
