Welcome to Macintosh, 24 years ago today

Never too late to react ... I fired up my old SE ... it even runs Quark Xpress 3 ... see it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pvantees/2216653836/

I'll never forget that day. My step father was the head of Academic Computing at a University in our home town (Arlington TX), and he brought home a 'Mac,' set it on the table, and my life has never been the same since.

Was cleaning out a storage closet at work in preparation for an upcoming move and found full set of System 7 floppies. Yes, even though I have nothing that can read a floppy, I saved them from the trash bin.

Yep. Old f@rt alert! I sure remember it well. Gave myself a scare when I played a pinball game that came bundled with System 1.0 on the 400K MFS (pre-HFS) 3.5 inch floppy disk, playing it on a Mac SE. I panicked when, booted into System 1, I didn't see the 20 MB hard drive. :-) Then I remembered that System 1 didn't have HD support. Oh. Heh heh. Whew!

Alas, I don't remember the name of that pinball game. And past a certain Mac model (around time of the Centris 650), Apple inserted ROM code to refuse to boot really old OS versions. So the SE was the last model I successfully played this game on.

Anybody remember the Font/DA mover that was so heavily used prior to System 7? Or ResEdit for hacking resources?

Old-timers will remember how early System versions looked on the 400K MFS floppy. The System Folder had only FIVE files, no directories, in it: Finder, System, Imagewriter, Note Pad File, Scrapbook File, and Clipboard File. They took up around 200K total. Let's see today's kids write an entire OS that's still usable in only 200K. :-)

One last thing... prior to System 6 with the MultiFinder hack, you could only run one application at a time. System 7 totally blew everybody away, with color support, with multifinder built in, and more! Apple even took out a very snazzy two page ad in USA Today the day System 7 launched to much fanfare.

The first MAC I ever used was a Mac Plus that belonged to my employer. He had added a "Big Picture" Monitor from EMachines and 20MB external hard drive. The Big picture monitor was a 14 inch B&W that connected via a clip attached to the 6800 processor and was built so that the Mac would tuck in behind it but still allowed access to the floppy drive. The 20MB drive represented a $2,000 investment. But It was all the storage we could ever need, and as long as we didn't take off the SCSI terminator it worked great!

Eventually we added an accelerator card from Gemini. It was a 20 mHz 68020 processor card that allowed us to run 2MB RAM and still use the monitor.

It's impact was life changing. I was fresh out of college with a journalism degree - which now collects dust as I make successful living in graphic design.

I was 13 years old playing around in my Dad's fledgling Ad Agency and he walked in carrying one by it's handle and put it on top of the flat file where all of the press type was kept. He turned to his two or three employees and said, "This is the future of Advertising. Learn it." and walked out. I thought he meant me too and have been a Mac user since that day. His agency is fifty or sixty people bigger now but, last I heard, that little Mac is still kicking and sits on the PR Director's desk where she uses Hypercard to house her contacts. She's not giving it up either.

I had one of the originals, too, and I'd have to say it made a pretty big impact on my life.

For anyone interested, here's an appreciation of Macs that I published 10 years ago in Technology Review, when Apple was at its nadir and I was wondering whether it was time to abandon ship:

http://davidshenk.com/webimages/to%20mac-TECHREVIEW.PDF

I was in the Air Force stationed at the Pentagon when they came out. We had Xerox Stars and a Lisa that was being evaluated, so I understood and admired the window and mouse interface paradigm. I lusted after the Lisa, but couldn't possibly afford one (the Lisa was $10,000 then) on a $1300 a month salary. When the Mac came out, I high tailed it down to the local Math Box store and slapped the plastic down. I also bought the external (400K for $499) floppy drive. I was in heaven. By 1985 I was a certified Apple Developer and developing on the Mac became the foundation of my advanced software engineering skills. I've never purchased a PC (they've been forced upon me a few times)- having been a Mac guy all along. Finder 1.0, System 7, (where they drove golf carts into the keynote at the Apple Developers conference in '91 and gave everyone a copy), OS 9, OS X. When Jobs came back, I knew great things would happen- he always understood that you made it simple with two machines (entry level and professional- and later laptops, a third) - and that the company would emerge from the "dark ages" brought on by Sculley and company.
I still develop on the Mac, and my current efforts in my PhD. studies are being done on Macs, Xserves, and OS X. With the iPhone and iTouch we're seeing new and exiting delivery platforms for information and new and exciting navigational opportunities for UI studies within medicine.
It's come a long way from the $2499 128k machine that captured my dreams in 1984- my current home machine has a 1.5TB raid array inside- but I still love pulling up a chair and seeing that cursor zip across the screen when I flick the mouse. Happy 24th Mac!

i still have one of these, and it still boots! i lack a mouse for it though. i'm still trying to find an *original* mouse. anybody have one?

I STILL HAVE ONE!!! As I recall, it is my second version - speed upgrades. I was invited by local NJ computer store to come in and check out LISA a year before MAC was intro'd. It was lovely, but I told them no one would buy because $10,000 was way out of line even for a desktop business computer. Of course when they MAC came out the lesson had been learned. I still have my last one and it still runs - it has all the signatures inside the cabinet, if you recall, of the TEAM.