This week was the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh. I wasn’t there for that particular intro. But I read about it, saw the Super Bowl commercial and dreamed about getting one of those cool computers. I’d been working for the phone company for five years and regularly wandered by the computer stores in the mall to ogle at the newly introduced IBM PCs but didn’t think that I could afford such things. But Kim, my wife at the time, who had been working part time for HR Block, told me that I could income-average my income tax, because the first five years with the phone company they increased my pay rate every six months and that should lead to a big income tax return. I immediately started gathering information about which micro-computer I wanted to buy. I still have some of the magazines that I consulted to make this buying decision. Alas, my brother, who was working in business computer sales at the time, stirred me away from buying this new-fangled Macintosh. I ended up buying into a computer platform that had several years behind it and seemed pretty stable in the burgeoning micro-computer market. I bought my first of two Kaypro computers in March of 1984.

1984 computer magazines
kaypro ii

I wonder how different my computer/technology journey would have been had I jumped into the Apple Macintosh World in 1984 instead of waiting for Second Coming of Jobs in 2002. As it turned out, my “stable well-established” computer platform, a Kaypro system running the CP/M operating system, disappeared from store shelves and the market in the early 1990s and that forced me to pull out my Phillips head screw driver and figure out how to support myself and my orphaned computers. I might have ended up in the same dead-end spot had I gone Macintosh. Who knows. In the meantime I learned how to  troubleshoot and how to do DIY microcomputer support. Thank God for computer user groups (like the NOCCC, North Orange County Computer Club) or I probably wouldn’t have survived my transition from CP/M to DIY PC clones to Microsoft Windows, that I worked at all the way until I went full-Apple Mac in 2008.

Apple Macintosh G4 Power Mac similar to the one I purchased in 2002 (baku13, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons)
Apple Macintosh G4 Power Mac similar to the one I purchased in 2002 (baku13, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons)

I might have been a roll-your-own PC guy for the first 20-years of my computer/technology journey, but I knew enough that if I had any video editing project then I needed to use whatever Macintosh I could get my hands on. I tried to do video editing on my PCs, and even bought special hardware to do the digital video conversion, but it was so kludgy that I only needed to go through that experience once to fully commit to seeking out a local Macintosh whenever a video editing project was given to me.  I also switching from the phone company to public school teaching in 1995 and entered a more Apple-friendly world (where I had access to Macs when needed). In 2000 I went to my first San Francisco MacWorld Expo (paid for my the school district and a grant) where Jobs introduced Mac OS X Aqua. It would be another two-years before I purchased my first personal Macintosh (a Power Mac G4 tower). I returned to attending MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in 2007, the year Jobs introduced the original iPhone.

2007 MacWorld Expo San Francisco Program Guide (cover)
2007 MacWorld Expo San Francisco Program Guide (cover)

The world might have been going to hell, but things were happening in Cupertino and I said good-bye to my collection of PCs in 2008 and haven’t really looked back since1 So, I spent the first 20-years of the Macintosh era being mostly Mac-curious and the last 20-years Mac-committed. The 40th anniversary was brought to my attention when this video popped up in my feed from iJustine (whom I met at a MacWorld in 2007 when she was first “introduced” courtesy Alex Lindsay at an in-person MacBreak weekly gathering):

Then on Wednesday evening the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California had a presentation, moderated by David Pogue with panels featuring computer luminaries connected with the design and development of the original Macintosh, the marketing team and “influencers” before that was a term. 

Whatever you might feel about Apple (Computer) and the history of technology over the last fifty years, I feel blessed that I have lived in a time when these things took place and every day I enjoy the results of their dreams of what living with technology could be. 

  • 2024-01-24 iMac home setup - high top table area
    2024-01-24 iMac home setup – high top table area
  • 2024-01-24 Mac Studio home setup - sit/stand desk area
    2024-01-24 Mac Studio home setup – sit/stand desk area
  • 2024-01-24 Macintosh 40h anniversary - iJustine
    2024-01-24 Macintosh 40h anniversary – iJustine

Sources:

  1. Alas, the school district I just retired from, Clark County School District, is definitely in the Microsoft Windows camp and the first computers that I worked with at my first school in the district, zSpace 3D/VR workstations, were all running Windows. Working with LEGO robotics and VEX robotics was also more Windows friendly. Whatever. I brought my personal MacBook Pro to work every day and did all of my work on that platform. Even when they gave me a Windows PC to work with at the beginning of the work-from-home time,  I bought an iMac 27” all-in-one to get the job done. Meanwhile, students were issued Chromebooks, so everything went browser based and it didn’t matter what OS the browser was based on.[↩]