Today the Mac computer turns 30 years old — I can hardly believe it, especially since I’ve had Macs for about 28 of those years. The photo here is of a Mac Plus, which is what I had then. The very first Mac wasn’t as powerful as this one. LOL!
Why did I decide on a Mac, rather than the more common IBM-types of the day? There were a couple of reasons. First, I was teaching French in those days, and typing in French required special software on the IBM clones; on the Mac, foreign-language support was built right in. And then, who could resist that adorable little trashcan for getting rid of things you no longer needed? 😉
I became pretty proficient on my Mac Plus, with the result that my school district sent me to tech training so I could do repairs in our small town, eliminating the need to send machines away to be fixed. I worked on Apple IIs right up through the Macs that came along. Because I’d learned how to do that, I was able to upgrade the RAM on my Mac from 1MG to a whopping 4MG — the maximum possible!
My first hard drive was 20MG, and I explained to my husband that I’d never need anything larger, because who could possibly fill up something that big? Oops. No one could have guessed that we’d be dealing in gigabytes and terabytes now.
I’m still a “Mac person” all these years later; I’m on my eighth or ninth Mac (I can’t remember exactly!) now — a Retina MacBook Pro — and have added iPhones and iPads along the way. A few years ago I even convinced my husband, who isn’t interested in technology, to get his own Mac.
Happy birthday, Mac!
