I cut my teeth on an Apple ][+ – all tricked out with that card that gave you lowercase letters to go along with the uppercase ones. Messed around with basic (10 GOTO 100 …) and PEEKed and POKEd whatever I could figure out. We also got a Commodore 64 somewhere in there, with the cassette drive and later even a ginormous floppy drive. The C64 was chiefly superior for its color capabilities iirc.
The first computer that was fully mine was an Apple IIc that I used in college – it was more or less luggable, not exactly a laptop. I had the weird little monitor that you could kind of slide it under. Then I graduated to an Apple IIgs, which I still think was the apotheosis of the Apple II line. I had a mouse, but there wasn’t much use for it. I have vivid memories of doing actual research online – Gopher was revelatory, and a taste of the Web to come. I used Macs in the computer labs – including this crazy thing called Netscape Navigator, which came out just before I graduated. There wasn’t much to see on the World Wide Web (I remember some movie reviews at CERN, for some reason), but you could feel the potential.
Then came my first Mac – a PowerBook Duo (230 I think). That’s probably my all-time favorite machine, partly for sentimental reasons. It was tiny by the standards of the day. The mini-dock was a thing of practical beauty. I used it for years, in at least six states. Pretty sure I read the Starr Report on it, which took for. ever. to download. I can still see that precursor to the Dock – the Control Strip? – in all its grayscale glory at the bottom of the built-in screen.
Then came the blue and white Mac G3 – I managed to skip all the beige PC-looking Macs in that era when they were all named like unremarkable family sedans (Performa, Centris, Quadra, Cilantro … the profusion of models and features confused the heck out of me, despite reading the Mac magazines religiously). The G3 was like a grownup version of the Duo, and lasted me for years; at one point I added an Iomega Zip drive and felt so cool – and then failed to add a second internal hard drive because it turned out I had the first version of the Blue and White G3 and it could only take one drive. Pretty sure I went through OS 8 and 9 and finally several flavors of X on that beauty – maybe even 6 and 7, I forget.
In retrospect, it’s the only non-laptop Mac I ever owned, and it’s also the last computer I had that really stands out in my memory. Since then there was a white clamshell laptop, and several aluminum unibodies. They all blur together – after the G3, it was the OSes that stole the show. The hardware was just there to keep up, or maybe add an onboard CF card reader to make photography easier or whatever. They’ve all been great machines (butterfly keyboards aside), but fairly impersonal.
The one exception might be the MPB (with touchbar, but also a physical escape key) I use now – it has personality again, thanks to touchId (game-changing!), unlocking with my watch and the touchbar itself. It turns out I enjoy it. It isn’t revolutionary, but it’s interesting and fun, and one of these days I’ll put it to work on automations. I actually wish they’d keep it around (I know, I know…).
What a trip down memory lane. Thanks for starting the thread, @MitchWagner. Great topic. I’ve enjoyed reading everyone else’s journeys too.
