25 Years of Macintosh

Tomorrow, 24 January, marks 25 years since Apple introduced the Macintosh. Though I've used Apple computers for 23 years, I didn't jump to a Mac until about 1994. Our first computer was an Apple IIe. We splurged an bought a whole megabyte of RAM and a revolutionary 3.5" disk drive. Four years later, we debated switching to a Mac but they were too slow -- processor speed and RAM hadn't caught up to the demands of the graphical interface. So, we stayed with the Apple II and bought an Apple IIgs. Each of those original computers was used for more than 10 years.

Since then, though, it's been Mac all the way. There are 4 in our house -- a non-working PowerBook G4, an iBook G3 that acts as a print server* on our wireless network, my 2006 MacBook Pro, and my wife's 2008 MacBook.

The Mac was introduced during the Super Bowl 1984 with this commercial -- a slam at IBM's everything-looks-alike corporate image:



Happy Birthday, Macintosh!

Run (and compute) well, y'all,
Bob

*I was surprised the other day by how cool this setup is. My wife had printed something, went upstairs to get the document, and came down with a database that she hadn't printed. I didn't recognize it at first. Then I remembered that earlier in the day, at my office downtown, I had tried to print a document and hit "Print" too quickly sending the document to the default printer, this iBook print server, rather than the one in our office. I thought it odd that that document wasn't stuck in my print queue but didn't think much of it. Turns out that the document had been sent via the internet to our house to that iBook. I had no idea that was possible.