Comments on: Mac at 25: Send us insanely great stories

We're looking for reader stories and photos from the past 25 years of Apple's Macintosh as part of a package we're putting together for next week.

[medeniz]

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.

[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted]

[nate2551]

I currently own the Intel based aluminum iMac that I actually just bought a week ago or so. I love it more than anything, but my favourite Mac desktop will always be the iMac G4. I just love the design of it. While I look back now and realize how ugly the iBook G3 (I think...the iBook that came in blueberry, tangerine, etc.) was, I remember loving that thing. I wanted the tangerine one for so long and of course, never got it (how many 13 year olds had laptops 10 years ago?).

I grew up with a mac (one of the Power Mac 5000s I believe) and switched over to Windows when I was about 13. Had a Windows machine up until about a year ago and didn't mind it. Bought a new Windows, Windows Vista that is, and absolutely hated it. I dealt with it for a year, and recently purchased an iMac and will never go back to Windows again! I'd also prefer never to have to run Windows in BootCamp as well, lol. ...So far, so good.

[the_iceman]

I'm a PC and I say happy 25th little adopted sister

[MadLyb]

And this one time...at Mac camp...

[sadchild]

i was an avid apple 2 user. when the mac came out i was told that i couldn't take any of my apple 2 with me. and i never looked back.

[phrag414]

my second and most memorable mac would be the mac portable. i remember lugging that thing in the airport with its lead battery and its big arce case. at the time, very cool lcd screen, not the backlit version, which i thought was a little too blue. too bad it "blew out" two "power boards" as applecare kept calling it. still have it in my basement.

such fond memories of playing shufflepuck cafe and tetris...and thinking that macwrite would outdo microsoft word.

[GooeyDeveloper]

My husband and I were working in process control when the Mac first came out and had to deal with character based graphics and DEC PDP/11s. We purchased one and immediately got hooked. The voice of the computer was pretty cool. Oddly, we named the computer "Albert" and had it say it's own name which was pronounce "Axel-bert". I still get a kick out it today and think of it everytime I hear that voice.

[dfarber]

I first saw the Mac in Sept 1983 when we were starting Macworld magazine. After years of DOS and WordStar it seemed revolutionary. What I remember most is the endless disk swapping to load or save files, and the wonder of the primitive MacWrite and MacPaint. Looking back the spirit of the Mac....with the imprint of Steve Jobs and a talented group of engineeers, designers and marketers who felt they were changing the world...continues with the iPod and iPhone...packaging available technology in ways that impresses users.

[Dan Owen]

My first Mac, a PowerMac 7100, was a fine computer at the time. After that I had a series of PCs, since 3D SW and good graphics cards only came out for the PC.

As the PC OS became increasingly problematic and Mac compatible 3D SW and good graphics cards came on line, the reason for possessing a PC started to evaporate.

I'm happy to say that I now have a quad core Mac Pro w/ 16 GB RAM and a good, affordable graphics card.

It is good to be back in the Mac camp, I don't anticipate leaving again.

[rory865]

My father had this (still does) ancient Apple computer, the one that looks like a giant, off-white-colored block with the tiniest screen in the world, and the multi-colored Apple logo on the front. In the early nineties, my three sisters and I used to huddle around the tiny black and white screen shooting more buffalo than we could carry back to camp with us on Oregon Trail. I visited my family for Christmas a few weeks ago and almost, almost had enough motivation to boot that old Apple up and play again. I wish I had now.

[Grammar-Nazi]

My first Mac was a Mac plus, which my parents bought for me as a graduation gift from high school in 1987. For 10 years, that trusty Mac was my primary computer. First, with a 20 MB, that's right -- Megabyte -- external hard drive that was bigger than my desktop today. Second, it had a 2400-baud modem that let me get on Compuserve -- that's right, Compuserve! Third, it was just, well, simple to use. I upgraded it over the years, upping the ram all the way to 8 MB! I even had to put on this wrist thing and plug myself into the wall when replacing the ram! Who else on here did that?!? In 1997, my wife and I were visiting Washington, D.C., and touring the American History Museum component of the Smithsonian, and lo and behold, there was my Mac Plus sitting under glass in the museum. For 10 years that computer had been my faithful and just servant. Suddenly, it was a museum piece. I immediately bought a PowerMac 6400 as a replacement.

Today, I type this message to you on my 17-inch MacBook Pro, while listening to my iPod shuffle. For 25 of my 40 years, Mac has been a part of my life! And it will never leave me!

[whiplash55]

I beccame caught up in Mac fever rather late. My first Mac was a g3 ibook. What a cool computer it was at the time it had 10.2 on it and I loved it. Until that is until the logic board went out just after the waranty expired. So I fixed it $400 or so later, I used it until the I bought a G4 iBook same basic computer but unfortunitly shortly after the waranty expired the logic board and the hard drive died.
But I became enamoured with the beautiful 12 inch Powerbook, what a machine it was it ran fine for years with no problems until I tried to install Leopard, what a disaster, the G4just didn't cut it. I looked at a new MacBook Pro decided they cost to much. Now I run a Dell, not as pretty but it flys running Vista and I won't be back. Overpriced hardware great OS,(but not that great!).

[Bill_I]

I borrowed a Mac toaster to use MacWrite for an article. It was so much easier than using Wordstar that I was hooked immediately. When I got a bigger Mac, I gave the old one to my brother so his kids could grow up using one from the start. Go rent the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley", its pretty true to life.

[Jonser315]

My father was an Apple guy since the Apple2. My first machine was the 2c. My father and I would talk Mac like other fathers and sons talk sports. My favorite was when he sat down at my new biondi blue iMac and said "4 gigabytes, what the hell are you ever going to do with 4 gigabytes". He bought a new G3 tower the next week. Every new update brought a phone call. We would discover new things and share them. We would argue with PC people just for sport. Since my father passed 5 years ago, my mother has picked up that mantle. She joined the her local MUG. After Macworld, she was the first one I called to tell her about what I had seen. I can always count on those phone calls.
Thanks Apple
Bruce Kolman

[pbg3445]

My first Mac was a 128k Mac. My previous machine was an Apple /// that I bought for writing because my accountant said I should add some business expenses to my budget. (I looked at the Lisa but $10,000 was an awful lot of money in 1983.)
(When contemplating whether to get a ProFile with it, 5 megabytes for $2,000, my friend said "Buy it. It's hardware. Hardware doesn't come down in price." I didn't.)
The 128K Mac was dinky compared to the ///, and in order to do any work, I did the endless floppy shuffle. But you could have the MacOS and MacWrite and MacPaint on a 400K floppy and have room for your files.
I learned to use atorx screwdriver and added a 1 meg upgrade board that you had to press down on top of the motherboard, and a SCSI port that dangled out the battery case like a mistake.
But on it, my friend Mike Saenz and I created a comic book, SHATTER, that is arguably the first desktop publishing project.

[vahcs]

I remember staring at the Lisa, MacXL, and Apple II computers at the local computer store. I was in 4th or 5th grade and I was 10 or 11. It was so cool to see a computer with nice cool graphics (I LOVED MACPAINT). It ruled 100 times more than the boring Timex Sinclaire 1000 we had.

My parents ended up buying the 128k Mac. I wrote school papers on it (hell yeah) and played Infocom's Seastalker (too hard).

In middle school, we got a memory upgrade (512k baby!) and I remember playing Dark Castle all the time after school. (I used to sing "Dark Castle" to the theme of the Beastie Boys' "Brass Monkey": Dark Castle...Dark Castle-Castle!"). I remember also gettings tons of shareware from my cousin, who was a member of Compushare.

In college, I brought an SE to school and eventually, I saved up enough to buy a Quadra 660 AV to start doing video editing. Those were the days of Crystal Quest, Bolo, Marathon, and whoa...WEB SURFING on Mosaic! I also started getting jealous of my friends' PCs with all their cool 3D games.

After college, I switched to a Dell (I could never find anything online that would work with a Mac) and stayed with the same PC (lots of upgrades tho) for NINE FREAKING YEARS! It was aight, but when Boot Camp and Intel Core 2 Duos appeared, I made the switch back to a 2 Ghz MBP.

I'm glad I switched back.

[AppleSuxLeo]

A great one is the Youtube video of Jimmy Fallon talking about how he made a bunch of money on the Palm Pre launch because he had prior to event bought 1000 shares. Then he pulls out his iPhone and the screen won`t turn on and he and the interviewer chuckle and says it is a common iPhone problem ;)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/156/80.569/

[thorpedonj]

My first mac experience? How about going back to the Apple II? I lived on a II/II+ and IIe. I even remember the Apple II GS! Imagine that. But my first mac was a black and white Mac Plus! 40 MB external hard drive! then it crashed, died. Then I bought a Packard Bell! I remember being thrilled when upgrading to 16 mb of ram, and installing windows 95! Then I got a Pentium 133! and became an AMD fan with the K6 233 Mhz! Wow! 128 mb of ram, and running NT workstation! Left for 2 years for a mission. Came back, Windows 2000 was the norm. Bought several k6-2 350, 450, 500! The glory days of Socket/Super 7! Vowed never to buy Intel again... :-) Then I got my first socket A Athon XP 3000+! Then I bought my laptop Athlon 64 3400+! Then a dual core 4200+ X2. I managed to find a Duron 850, and managed to get a Dell Deminsion 3000 P4 2.8, barely upgraded it to 1 gb of ram. Been thru windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT, 2000, XP and now am being trained on Vista, and just downloaded Windows 7 beta. Not to mention Linux! Ubuntu, Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, etc. And I still can't afford a MacBook Pro. So, I'm waiting for the third generation quad-core models to ship, one day. then I can run everything using bootcamp, or parallels desktop, OSX, XP,Vista, Linux. Heck, why not?
The point I am making in all of this is that I go with the flow, not resist it! The more you know the better.

[clinedesign]

Quite a few years ago my son and I were standing in a long line outside the Moscone Center waiting to get into the Macworld keynote. A woman walks by handing out luggage tags that had Google written on them. This was before anyone had heard of the search engine giant. We were all asking each other what a Google was when a silver Mercedes pulls up to the curb. Steve Jobs and his entourage get out, the long line, hundreds of people, waiting for the keynote goes completely silent. Nobody says a word as Steve, giving us all a slight smile, enters Moscone through a side-door. After the door closed the line went crazy with what we had witnessed.

[fourchimney]

1984. I was a long-time Apple ][ user (pre + and pre "e") and had managed to start making a living with the thing, thanks to Beagle Brothers software and the Big Red Apple Manual written by the Woz. Apple put on an unveiling at the Daughters of the American Revoution Hall in Washington, DC and I was there. There with with my jaw dropped down to the floor. A mouse? Drawing shapes on the screen with a few mouse clicks? Copy and paste? Wow! I bought one as soon as they were available. Got the printer and everything.

It was great... at first. But then I noticed it kinda crashed every few minutes. It would lock up, so it came with a little plastic thingy to press in-between the cooling slots to reset it. I finally decided after a month or so that although it was cute and fun and all, it was not as productive as my Apple ][.

I had to get rid of it.

Luckily I found a sucker. My Dad. He was do consulting work on a little Caribbean island at the time so I went down to see my folks over Christmas with the Mac, keyboard, mouse and printer all shoved into an extra suitcase, and all protected by layers of underwear and T-shirts.

Things went fine until I got stopped by the machine-gun-carrying customs agents. They had never seen a computer before. I explained what it was and told them that I had to work a little while I was there. "What do you mean.. working while you are on vacation?" Jeesh. They finally let me go.

Anyway Dad loved it, I only charged him what I paid for it so I didn't feel too bad.

Eventually I discovered 256K PCs with 4-color graphic cards and never looked back. I've bought a few Macs for employees over the years but never had one again for myself.