Anybody else here from the old days?

I was starting to wonder... with the number of recent switchers at the forum, how many others are there like me? Who else has memories of their first PCI Power Macintosh with System 7.5.5? Who else remembers eagerly tearing the shrinkwrap off of OS 8.5 and feeling like it was an amazing new world when installing it on a slate gray Powerbook? Who else remembers the Apple Extended Keyboard? The SE/30? The Color Classic? <3

I still have a lot of the Macs from when I was a kid!

Our original Macintosh 512KE with Dove SCSI card and 1MB RAM upgrade
A non-working SE/30 with 80MB hard disk
A Quadra 840AV with 128MB of RAM
A Power Mac 7200/120 that my dad used
My mom's Power Mac 6500/250
My Powerbook 3400/180 from high school

It really, honestly is fun to look back at what Apple used to be and remember the good times. I think they make the good times I have now even more special.

I just wish that a lot of the recent switchers could have known that joy!

Well as a switcher 12mths ago, i have come to see a good deal of members here talk about "the old days" and there experiences with there Mac's over time.
Now having switched and as most people, realise and cant understand why i didnt so much longer ago, I sit here and can only read of the tails of yesteryear and there Mac stories.
My memory is , commodore64, amiga and then windows PC's for the rest of it.

You will get a good response to this thread as the memories come flooding back for a few.
Enjoy

Cheers

Jamie-Jamie said:

I was starting to wonder... with the number of recent switchers at the forum, how many others are there like me?

Click to expand...

Just hang out in the forums for a while...you'll find out who the "old-timers" are.

- Nick

Got my first Mac back in day, Macintosh Plus 1mb Ram and a 20MB SCSI hard drive and a image writer 1 printer.

I've been using Mac's since the late 80's, but didn't own any of my own till the late 90's/early 2000's.

As we established before, been using Macs since my dad brought one home for his graduate studies in the late 80s/early 90s. Mac SE was the first one I remember, unless there was another that looked similar to the SE.

First machine that I can remember was that SE. Then came the Power Mac 7200/120. I was pumped because it had a color display. Then the Grape 333MHz tray loading iMac. AKA, the machine that started the revolution and brought Apple back to the top of the computing world. They pushed USB as a standard.

Then came the OS X experiment. We tried putting OS X on the iMac, and it crapped the bed. It was never the same, even when we tried to reinstall OS 9. Firmware must have gotten destroyed or something. Anyway, this forced the transition to the huge upgrade of an 800MHz G4 eMac running 10.2. From that day on I sang OS X its praises. June 2004, I got my dual 2 GHz PowerMac G5 tower and huge 23 inch ACD. The clear plastic spacey one. It was so cool, the old G4 style plastic. *Drool*

Then that baby died after 4 good years of service. I didn't have the cash to repair the logic board AND processors (the long story of how my computer died is documented in like 8 different threads, so i'll spare you all). I had to wait a year to get the funding. Thankfully I had switched my fiancee to the light side within a year of meeting her (my G5 said all that needed to be said), so I got to use a G4 eMac for that year. Now here I am with my aluminum MacBook, purchased April 2009.

<3 my life with Apple. The one company I trust.

My dad's also a professor, and always got the university he teaches at to get him Apple hardware, so I also had access to a blue and white G3 powermac tower (with matching CRT monitor), beige G3 power mac, a G4 pod iMac, titanium powerbook, a couple of his other powerbooks, and now most recently, a 20 inch aluminum iMac, 2GHz C2D.

OLD days! 300 Baud Modem. My first BBS.
Commodore 64 followed by Atari 130XE Modded with 512MB RAM Disk.
Atari 1040ST and Amiga 500.
First PC was a 286/16 with 1MB RAM.
First Mac was a Plus. Still own the Plus and a Mac 512.

So yes, go back to the early days of both Macs and computers.

a n00b here in the Macintosh world. My mother was nice enough to allow me to get the MacBook I was looking at with her bonus money. Purchased her on May 25th 2008 (I know because I looked at the date I added my first GarageBand song to iTunes, which I made within 10 minutes of turning the machine on)

That feels like such a long time ago. She has been through a lot with me. I never realized I have almost had this machine for two years. She's still cooking, and only real problem she had was a kernel panic, that was solved shortly.

I am really happy with this computer!

I've always wanted a Mac since the release of OS X but never could afford one until late 2006. So I'm somewhere in between The Transition and The Fashion Era

Started with Tandy TRS 80 and commodore 64. ( Jurassic Park )

In terms of Operating Systems .... from CP/M to OS X in less than 30 years

Switched to OS X in 2008 ... good choice.


Cheers ... McBie

Technically it was ib the late 80's for me. Mind you I was like 4 or 5 at the time. But yes I have the photos of me infront of some old old Mac and me just staring at the screen not knowing what it was. It seems my family got me into Apple really early.

1990 LC original with RGB colour monitor, 160MB hard drive and maxed out to 8MB RAM, system 7.0.0, total of about nine white floppies in a nice little folder. Upgraded to 7.0.1 which required eleven floppies, and still use it with my Apple QuickTake 200 camera.

Kash said:

I've always wanted a Mac since the release of OS X but never could afford one until late 2006. So I'm somewhere in between The Transition and The Fashion Era

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Yep, missed us in the middle there right before the fashion era.

I walked past those Apple aisles for years as I headed to pick up the newest game and/or video card that just came out. If it wouldn't play my newest game, just wasn't much use to me back then.

harryb2448 said:

1990 LC original with RGB colour monitor, 160MB hard drive and maxed out to 8MB RAM, system 7.0.0, total of about nine white floppies in a nice little folder. Upgraded to 7.0.1 which required eleven floppies, and still use it with my Apple QuickTake 200 camera.

Click to expand...

I remember the LC series, I think here in the U.S. even back then it was still over $2000.00 brand new.

The original LC was $2400, but the LCII and LCIII were around $1300. I wanted an LCIII but ended up inheriting a Quadra 840AV instead.

Jamie-Jamie said:

The original LC was $2400, but the LCII and LCIII were around $1300. I wanted an LCIII but ended up inheriting a Quadra 840AV instead.

Click to expand...

I remember when the Quadra was the sh*t.

Kash said:

I've always wanted a Mac since the release of OS X but never could afford one until late 2006. So I'm somewhere in between The Transition and The Fashion Era

Click to expand...

That's kind of where I was as well. When they switched to Intel and I could run Windows if I needed it, that cinched it for me.

bargsbeer said:

I remember when the Quadra was the sh*t.

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The one I have was around $12,000 in 1993 or 1994 when it was new. It originally ran CAD/CAM and interfaced with this closed-circuit camera to monitor the CAM fabricator machine.

It still runs as far as I know, but I don't have a monitor for it anymore. My last screen with the old wide Mac video plug went out years ago

When I last turned it on, I had 8.1 installed with Office 4.3 and a bunch of other crap that's mostly useless at this point since I don't have any AV hardware to plug into it.

My good ol' days started out with all of the time I spent with our family's Apple //e. I loved that computer, and still have it. Oh, how I wish I could have gotten a //gs! I wanted one so badly, and I still do. I'm going to buy one some day if I can find one in good condition for a reasonable price.

Switched to IBM-compatible PCs in the late '80s and am still there, but parallel with that I've also been working with Macs. This may sound silly, but in the late '90s I purchased a refurbished Macintosh Classic simply because I wanted to own that particular kind of Mac -- essentially the original kind that started the GUI revolution. It really didn't cost that much, and now I have it here in my office as a kind of "piece of history." Then I bought a G3 iMac with Jaguar on it seven or eight years ago, and now I have a new Mac Mini.

Honestly, I really hated the Mac when it first came out. I was a major Apple // fanboy as I had started using them and got my first experience programming back in late '79 (I was almost 9 at the time) and loved the line up until my sophomore year in college when I had to switch to a DOS machine because the compilers I needed to use for school were for DOS (I put it off as long as I could even using my gs at the time to connect to the unix machines at school to do my coding). I felt at the time that Apple had really turned it's back on a very faithful group of computer owners when it pretty much abandoned the // line in favor of the Mac (which I know I wasn't the only one at the time that felt that and at the time there was a significantly larger user and software base for the // line). I had purchased a Mac here and there used but never really touched them (had them incase at the time someone came asking for help on one so I could have something to learn/experiment on instead of their machine). I only switched to Mac back in the beginning of '09 - and I'll admit I'm a very happy Mac owner (well, multiple Mac as you can see from my sig-tag ).

Now, to CarpathiaMan - if you are ever really interested in getting an old GS, let me know - I went through a period back around 2000/2001 (when I owned a business and building in WI where I had more then enough space) where I got a wild hair about wanting to collect and catalog old Apple // gear. Although I've sold quite a few off as I really just don't have space any more, I still have quite a few GS machines (and II+, IIe (I still have one collectable which is a IIe that was from what it looks like originally used at Apple (it has an Apple metal inventory tag on it), and IIc+) and have a variety of parts (3 1/2's, 5 1/4's, memory cards, hard drives, keyboards, mice, manuals, software, ethernet card (yes, ethernet), etc.). Yeah, I kinda went crazy.