Mac at 25: Send us insanely great stories

What was your favorite Mac? The original iMac, maybe, introduced by Steve Jobs in 1998?

(Credit: Apple)

Next week marks the 25th anniversary of the debut of Apple's Macintosh--and we'd like to hear from you.

We're putting together a package to mark the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and if you'd like to be included, send us your stories, pictures, and thoughts by the end of this week. It could be your first Mac, your favorite Mac, and the Mac you still can't stop laughing about (we're looking at you, Cube).

Please try to keep submissions down to around 250-300 words if you'd like to be considered. We'd especially love to see any photos you have of old Macs that you'd be willing to let us use as part of our package.

You can e-mail me directly at [e-mail] or post your stories in the comments below. Please have everything into me, or in this post, by the close of business Friday to be considered for next week's package.

[crescentdave]

My fave was the Power Computing clone. All of a sudden, on the Mac side of things, you could customize a Mac, get a machine faster than the Apple version and experience a lot more bang for the buck. It was competition for the first time and when Jobs came back, he rightfully refused to renew all licensing programs. That, more than anything else, gave Apple a chance to regroup and look towards the future.

[Brian]

I don't know if I still have any special photos of my Macs.

I will see what I find.

[sanenazok]

Nice of you to bring up the iMac intro from 1998...hey look a presenter at Apple wearing business attire and discussing technical details instead of looks...how strange. It was a simpler time back then, when Apple demos could be watched without ooohing and aawing at every dumb thing, just applause when the product is unveiled. Also, too bad Apple didn't push the irda features more...were they ever used. My fave Mac is the circa 1996 Powerbook the school district was handing out for free when I was working there in 2001.

[b_baggins]

Right. Because the iMac with its revolutionary design was not about looks at all. Please. One of Apple's fundamental pillars is that computers should not only be functional, but sexy.

[i8246i]

I used to have so much faith in Apple as a viable competitor to the Microsoft monopoly. There was once a time where using an Apple machine had its merits other than "not using an M$ box". Mostly because of Windows 95's many flaws, everyone (even real businesses) was turning to the stability and user-friendliness of the Apple Macintosh to get their work done.

And Apple could have overtaken Microsoft. All they needed to do was to produce machines that ran applications just as fast as an IBM-compatible box, and price it cheaper than their competitors. But then we had the iMac...and the thousands of Apple excuses, such as the "Megahertz Myth". Then we have Apple never lowering the price on any of their machines, and making their machines totally incompatible with Windows 95 SE and Windows 98, which were gaining popularity like a plague. Then we have the final nail in the coffin as Apple starts putting IBM-compatible CPUs in their machines...making the choice between Apple and Microsoft a choice between a reasonably-priced IBM-compatible machine, and an overpriced toy-looking box that can also BE an IBM-compatible machine.

I think the only "great" stories you can tell about Apple is their early days of existence, of their early dominance of the market due to real ingenuity, integrity, and originality.

Now, you can "think different" by buying an IBM wannabe.

[sciontcya]

OK, my first Mac was in 1985.
FAT Mac - 512KE.
I spent:
$2500 with UCLA discount on the Mac with an external Numeric Keypad and ImageWriter Dot-Matrix printer.
$500 for a SCSI port to be put into the battery compartment.
$1200 for a SuperMac Dataframe 10 SCSI hard drive - 10MB!!!
A few hundred more $$$ for software and there was the thing that changed my life.
Never went back to the IBM XT/ATs we had in the lab.

New Macs are a better deal, but I miss that first one! :)

[billmosby]

I got my first Mac, a 128k plus an external drive, from the developer program in 1984. After Aztec C came out, I wrote a little shareware app called "Painter's Helper", which became the commercial "4Paint" in 1985. Now I have an app on the iPhone App Store, and have run into two people who actually remember those old Mac apps. I suspect I had many more users back in the day than anybody ever let on. Maybe someday somebody will also remember Crater Naut!

[Penguinisto]

The Cube. Hands Down.

It was my last, great fling at hobbyist customization of any computer (be it Mac, PC, or what-have-you). Its small size made for a challenge, but the extensibility of the thing was fantastic. I went from a 500MHz to a 1.2GHz G4 processor. I managed to shoehorn a Radeon 7000-series card into it. By the time I was done playing around on the thing, I managed to sell it (about three months before the Mini came out) for a price far higher than I ever expected to get for any four-year-old machine, let alone a tiny Mac that had been beaten to within an inch of its life by a hobbyist... and it was still as quiet as a complete vacuum (no fans at all in there - it was all convection-cooled all the way up until the CPU bump, when I broke down and stuck in a small fan to push things along).

OTOH, I remember an old PowerBook 540 I had - it was built in 1994, and yet when I gave it away in 2005 to a buddy of mine, the battery was shot, but still ran its original install of MacOS 7 just fine.

It's that kind of longevity and toughness that led me to use Macs as my mainstay machinery... I have yet to see anything Pentium-class or newer last nearly as long, and yet take so much abuse.

[ejeon1989]

I remember my dad getting the PowerBook 170. Our first computer ran Mac System 7, and my first notebook was a PowerBook G3 400Mhz. I still have all of the computers, and they still run very well considering that the 170 is over a decade old and the G3 still runs Mac OS X Tiger.

[AppleSuxLeo]

I have a great one...
Imagine it`s January 2009 and Steve Jobs is a no show and there are no new compelling Mac products.
Then BAM ! Ex Apple designer Jon Rubinstein blind sides Apple with a new phone and OS. Best of show overall , Best of show cell phone , People`s Choice award.
Jon Rubinstein is the "New Steve Jobs". Palm Pre is the new phone/OS to beat. Many thanks also to BONO and Elevation Partners.

[scott2400]

Keep trying, Leo, keep trying. Apple still haunts you constantly, doesn't it? And their phenomenal success over the last decade or so... well, all I can say is maybe you should up your meds a little, eh? Too much stress isn't good for the psyche.

[AppleSuxLeo]

As for the iPhone:

It's much slower; Rubinstein and his team say that's because the OS X code is not lean enough to run swiftly on a mobile device's relatively tiny processor and small memory footprint. And you can only do one thing at a time.

Apple introduced OS X for its personal computers in 2001, but pieces of the system trace their roots back to the 1980s, when they were used in the operating software of computers made by Jobs's other computer company, NeXT. Palm sees an opportunity to come out with something newer, better and?perhaps most impressive to gadget geeks?faster. A lot faster. "We're already four times faster than the iPhone, and we're still optimizing," McNamee boasts.

Palm expects people will keep 15 to 20 applications open at the same time.

[dbloyd]

The Mac is least 4 times faster than Vista / XP but that didn't make a difference. Same thing with the Palm phone.

[topgunb2]

if i say mac is 1000 times faster than vista/xp you still can't refute this claim can you?

[Penguinisto]

Right now, the Pre is a demo. It is also physically 2x as thick as an iPhone, with about the same width. Palm has no real developer base left, and its sales (and marketshare) have dropped like a rock. The apps Palm presents are basically nothing more than browser extension widgets, and the SDK details are completely lacking.

If the Blackberry Storm couldn't put a dent in iPhone sales, what makes you think that the more expensive Pre will?

[Notoapplefanbois]

@penguinisto: The reason why the Blackberry storm didn't make a dent in Iphone sales is because the people who bought them were smart enough to wait for a decent smartphone to come out. Everything the IPhone has, tens or hundreds of Phone's have it it before it.

And now that the N97 is in the game and so is the Pre, unless Apple come's out with a completely amazing Phone, it should lose comparing specs and Brand Name's but I suppose the Apple Fanboi's will be like "Oh s*** the IPhone is losing, I'm going to break my current one so I can buy another one to boost IPhone sales.

I'm sorry I got into this, I used to be an apple Fanboi myself, but ever since I actually bothered looking at what is best in the Market for the price I have dropped that. To be Honest if you CAN'T find a non-apple product that beats it's apple equivalent in value for money i'd be amazed. This is excluding the Macbook Air of course since there is no pricing on the adamo yet.

[Hep Cat]

"Jon Rubinstein is the "New Steve Jobs"."

Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahaha.

I know Ruby. He's no Steve. Very smart, talented buy - but not a great manager.

[Penguinisto]

@Notoapplefanbois:

You're still operating on conjecture, not fact... fact is, the Storm didn't sell enough to make a dent in the iPhone's marketshare. Neither has the Android. Neither have any of the other clones that came out since the iPhone was launched. I sincerely doubt that the Nokia N97 or the Pre will do much when they come out.

Disclosure: I use (and am perfectly happy with) a Blackberry Curve. So no, no fanboyism here... just fact.

"To be Honest if you CAN'T find a non-apple product that beats it's apple equivalent in value for money i'd be amazed"

Compared spec-for-spec, you'd be hard pressed to find a non-Apple equivalent that would provide the same value-for-price. It's not impossible (the grey market exists and thrives, after all), but you would seriously need to do some research, and even then you'd have to start looking at things like longevity and customer satisfaction. Throw in Vista, and suddenly the Apple product looks a hell of a lot more attractive...

/P

[Staszek]

@Notoapplefanbois

Here are a few problems with your statement. The N97 will never make a dent in the US (just like every other NXX phone Nokia makes) because no carrier seems to want to pick them up and subsidize them. I used to want an N series so bad but it just wasnt worth paying all the money for it. If that changes then maybe the N97 has a chance but as of right now its not even in consideration.

As for the Pre, we will have to see what happens, I love how its the best phone ever yet no one has touched one yet. It reminds me of the Storm, I was actually really excited about the Storm and when my sister was looking for a new BB I sent her all the specs. If the storm actually performed like it looked on TV then it would be awesome (except for Verizon not allowing Wifi which I will never understand). So with that in mind when it came out we both played with it extensively, she HATED it, hopefully firmware updates will fix it but it is incredibly slow.

The Pre could have something, but its problem is 1. Its not overly attractive from the looks of it its ok, but very plasticy and bulky. 2. It still remains to be seen if they can get a good App store going, webapps will not do it Apple failed trying that at first as well, and 3. this is a big one for now its on Sprint which is aweful (except for their aircards which are awesome).

I would like to see great competition from the Pre, it brings the rest of the market up, but I dont see it being the next HUGE phone, at least until its offered on another carrier.

[CBSTV]

Macintosh computers I have owned over the years:

SE, SE/30, IIci, Quadra 650, PowerMac 6100, PowerMac G4 450 mHz, iBook G4 1.25 gHz, PowerMac G4 MDD 1.25 gHz, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro

(I still have the SE/30 and it continues to work.)

[mike.gw]

The SE/30 was a great Mac! As a Network Administrator, it was my very first e-mail server, running Microsoft Mail.

The Color Classic was a cute all-in-one before the iMacs came along.

I have my 20th Anniversary Mac (TAM) still in it's original box. (Any takers?)

As an Apple salesman for McGraw-Hill Computer Store in NYC on 6th Avenue, I was thrilled when I put the 1st Mac II out on our sales floor. Later, we got a Radius Pivot Display! I was McGraw Hill's top LaserWriter salesman during a promotion they held at the time called The Great LaserWriter Challenge. The winner from each store was sent on a 3 day vacation in the Bahamas, curtesey of Apple Computer, all expenses paid (Thank you Apple).

Any old McGraw-Hill customers out there?

[grabulous]

I remember my first Mac, a Fat Mac 512k. It came with a built in floppy drive and an extra external floppy drive. This was the deluxe model in 1985, and cost 2500 bucks which is a lot more in today's money. It was the workhorse for me in college. Pagemaker and the Laserwriter allowed me to be a publisher, which was incredibly liberating.

[moretroops]

Not a "mac" per se, my first was the Apple IIc. Oh how I loved it. Still a beautiful machine, to this day. Then, in rapid succession: Mac Classic (dark days for the brand, but a wonderful machine), candy iMac, iBook, iMac G5, Macbook, and Macbook Pro. All good memories.

[tmt345]

I never owned one, but my friend has an iMac G4 its the most beautiful peace of hardware I've ever seen. The way your able to tilt the screen still makes me think "how cool is that". It was too expensive for me, my first mac was a 17 inch White iMac Intel Core 2 Duo. The iMac G4 is a perfect example of "if its not broken don't fix it" Apple thinks they have to change the design every few years because they think the consumer wants it, the iMac G5 is ugly compared to the iMac G4. Its also better for typing documents cause you can tilt the screen down and its perfect for movies too cause you can move the screen into "your perfect position" I wish apple would go back to this design and upgrade the hardware, I know I would buy it in a heartbeat! If you don't know what iMac I'm talking about just look at this ad on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npniSw1JobM

[b_baggins]

I have a 15" 800 mhz iMac G4 and you couldn't pry it from my cold dead hands. EVERYONE who has ever seen it has been struck speechless by just how sexy a piece of hardware it is.

[Leiderdorp]

I always thought it strange that anyone could be so drawn in by a Macintosh, and even stranger to actually think of it as a computer. My first computer was a PC clone 386SX with 1GB RAM and a huge 40MB HD. That was subsequently replaced by a 486 machine, but I was starting to tire of the little annoyances that would cause it to lock up etc. After playing with one of those brand new iMacs, I had to have one and bought the iMac DV SE and haven't looked back since. Now we run a white i(ntel)Mac and 2 Macbook Pro's and couldn't be happier!

[Launchpad_72]

My first ever computer when I was a kid was an Apple IIGS, complete with a 20GB hard drive, 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, and a color ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. I spent so much time on that thing playing things like number crunchers (munchers?), the orginal Oregon Trail, and others.
Then I got a Tandy 486 running Win '95, and never looked back. Until now.
And to think, I'm writing this on Windows 7.
Heh.

[Gromit801]

My first mac was the Turbo Mac, i.e., the Mac Plus in 1987. One whole whopping huge megabyte of RAM! WOW! And a Giant 30mb hard drive to go with it! I also bought an AST Turbolaser printer and an Apple OneScan Scanner. Scanned only in black and white or grayscale. I used that stuff for a good 11 years, using OS 6.0.2. Had ALDUS PageMaker 3.0. It all still works, but was eventually replaced by a desktop beige G3. 266mhz! 16mb of RAM, 4gig HD! I didn't know what I was going to do with 4 huge gigs of storage! Now, it's a 2.7ghz DP G5, a G4 PowerBook, and they're running quite strong enough for what I do, and I won't think about replacing them for awhile yet.

[oceanwest]

It all started for me just about 1996-97 I knew my brother purchased the Mac 512Ke for his business. I was using an Apple ][ + at the time. I had came over to his house for the weekend, I went upstairs in his loft where the Mac was setup, and it was if there were a halo around it; sitting there quant at the end of the room. We flicked it on and heard that crisp "BONG" well, lets just say i missed dinner as I was totally in love at first site. Since we had plans to go see a movie, I reluctantly pried myself away. The movie: Star Trek IV "The Voyage Home" probably the very first product placement for the Macintosh in a movie, where Scotty tries to verbally interfaces with the Mac, when that failed Dr. McCoy handed him the mouse, where Scotty attempts to speak into the mouse as a microphone... when they showed the Macintosh on screen my brother and I looked at each other knowing in an instant that we have embarked in to a new era!

None the less the crew saved the day. We got home and I returned to the loft where the now Famous Macintosh sat with that halo proudly shining. A few years later my brother was very busy in his business and needed a specialized software that wasn't available for the Macintosh. It was then banished to the basement covered in a garbage bag. I said WHAT! you can't do that. Suffice it to say the computer came home with me. ( I did not sleep that night at all!) I was feverishly trying every program, every desk accessory, - everything. Each program had an entire operating system on the floppy disk. My favorite program was FileMaker Plus, a seemingly little database program (Formerly named Nutshell - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filemaker) hence I own and operate the largest discussion forum (http://www.fmforums.com) and am also a certified FileMaker Developer.

A few years later I got my next computer it was the Macintosh Plus, with 2 floppy drives and a HARD DRIVE! When in high school as a freshman I was the only student who had one (a Mac) the teacher in the Graphics Arts department had three of them. One day student killed a keyboard somehow, I had a spare keyboard so I became teachers pet when brought mine with me while they waited to get a replacement.

Years have passed and I have owned: Apple ][ Plus, Macintosh 512k E, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh LC, Macintosh VX, Macintosh 7100, QuickTake 150, Powerbook 170, Newton Message Pad 130, Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet), PowerBook G3 (Lombard), iBook (Dual USB), iMac( Bondi Blue), iMac 15 inch Flat Panel (LampStyle) PowerMac G4(QuickSilver), iSight Camera, PowerBook 12 Inch, MacBookPro 15 Inch, Mac Mini, IMac 24 Inch Aluminum (Spring 08), MacBook Pro 15 Inch (Spring 08), iPhone 1gen, iPhone 3G, Original iPod, iPod Dock connector 30 GB, Original iPodNano, Apple TV. Cinema Displays 19 inch CRT, Blue & White, and 20 inch LCD. Airport Base Station (all versions) Airport Extreme and Time Capsule, Airport Express, ImageWriter II and LaserWriter Plus.

[moretroops]

You win the prize for most mac products. I thought I was in the running. I got trounced.

[jkramer48]

Reading these comments has brought back fond memories of the many Macs I have owned since 1984. One of my first was the Apple IIGS, which I paid $3200 for by the time I bought the extra drives and software I wanted, and the Imagewriter printer. Since then, I have owned nothing but Apple computers, although I use PC's at work. I much prefer Apple, which is not only more reliable, but fun to use. Apple products have always been cool! My favorite desktop is the iMac G4 (which I currently use), and my favorite laptop was a 14" Powerbook Pismo (400mhz); wish I had kept that laptop. It was easy to work on ( I added memory and airport card myself). I currently have an iBook G4 which is okay, but it feels flimsy compared to the Powerbook. I have bought and sold several Apple computers on Ebay, and have found that their resale value is quite high. The Pismo Powerbook sold for a little more than what I had paid for it, although I used it for several years. If Apple still sold printers, I would probably have one of those.

[ewelch]

At work, bought two Mac Quadra 950s the week they came out, with 256 megs of RAM ($10,000) and I sat on the copy desk half my day at work (I was a newspaper photographer) and I learned Photoshop inside and out. Still a photographer, and an editor, and still using Macs.

Best Mac? My current 2008 Mac Pro.

[billmosby]

Shortly after turning out my first shareware product, I went to work for a national lab, in the nuclear material safeguards field (1986). In short order, I and a colleague had written a gamma-ray spectroscopy data acquisition and analysis program, one version of which we used to drive a nuclear waste drum scanner. In those days, most such equipment was built and programmed in-house unless you wanted to pay LANL an arm and a leg for their hi-quality, hi-overhead stuff. The 512k Mac the software ran on was replaced by a Mac SE in the late 80s, if I am not mistaken. As of 2004 when I retired, it was still in use and running fine. Over the years I've had a 128k mac, a Mac II, an original iMac, a lampshade iMac, a 12" PowerBook, a G4 iMac, a MacBook, and now a 24" iMac. Plus an iPhone, an Apple TV, and miscellaneous iPods. My favorite? Whatever I have most recently bought.