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Belated Birthday Wish
I can’t believe I passed this day by without marking it, nor can I believe that it was Mom who reminded me of it… but I want to wish a Happy 20th Birthday to the Macintosh computer!
On January 24, 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer in an advertisement during the SuperBowl. You can see the original ad here if you didn’t catch it back then. Well, it’s more or less the original - you’ll notice the star of the commercial wearing a nifty piece of electronics that definitely did not exist back in 1984, though it may have been a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye.
In 1984, our family did not own a Macintosh, or any computer for that matter. I was just over five years old and hadn’t even started Kindergarten when the Mac was announced.
I don’t believe that I even used a Mac until perhaps 1988 or 1989. It may have been an SE or an SE/30.
Our family bought its first Mac, an LC, in the summer of 1991, seven years after the first Mac was introduced, just before I started seventh grade.
Six years later, in 1997, my parents got me a SuperMac J700/180 Mac clone, as a high school graduation gift. Though this wasn’t an Apple Macintosh per se, it was licensed by Apple to run the Mac OS…. for a very short time.
Four years later, in 2001, in my last semester at college, I bought a Apple PowerBook FW/400 (Pismo), just after Apple had introduced its brand new PowerBook G4 product line.
Two years later, in 2003, I purchased a used PowerMac G4 (AGP) to replace the aged and ailing J700 (which had actually been upgraded to a S900 with a G3 processor by that time).
I can’t remember the exact date, but somewhere along the way my parents replaced their aged Mac LC with one of the older iMac series… but that LC lasted QUITE a long time - it was their primary computer for around 10 years.
Through all the years, I’ve done my best to convince the people around me that purchasing a Macintosh computer is the best way to go. It is always a difficult task; most people are quite willing to go with a Windows-based computer, which is admittedly an inexpensive solution and may indeed be “good enough” for most people. But I firmly believe that like many excellent things, it is worth your time and effort to save the money needed to take that step up to a truly remarkable personal computer - something that is more than just “good enough.”
An operating system and computer hardware platform that work hand-in-hand - a winning combination. Here’s to you, Macintosh.
By Peter | 01.27.2004 | 02:13 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | No Comments