My First Mac – Happy Anniversary, Macintosh!

It was 24 years and 10 months ago when I got my first Mac. Here is my story:

My First Macintosh

I’ll never forget it. I had seen a Lisa in January of 1983 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The graphics were fantastic, unlike anything I had seen before. The Lisa was from the snobbish Apple Computer, Inc (I was an Atari guy) but this machine seemed to have personality.

In early 1984 I learned of the Macintosh. I had missed the infamous commercial during the Super Bowl, but I had picked up a copy of Byte magazine which had a cover story of the Macintosh. It showed a 1 bit digitized image of the Macintosh team, including Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. It talked about the hardware, the software, the memory and the fact that the inside of the case had the signatures of the team inside. How cool was that!

When I came home from boarding school for spring break in March of 1984 (I was a senior in high school), my grandfather asked what I wanted for graduation. He knew about my successes writing software and was interested in helping my career. Did he ever. I said, “Well this new Macintosh computer is the future of computing! It will change how we interact with computers and I bet will become something of a legend. However, even at 1/4 the cost of a Lisa, it is too expensive at $2,500.” My grandfather disagreed and that week I had a brand new Macintosh!

I was so excited when I got home I couldn’t move fast enough to unpack it. However, Apple’s design sense slowed me down. The box had this fantastic picaso-esque Mac on the side. The manual was ring bound and looked gorgeous.

Then there was this little beige mouse and a cassette tape. A tape? What was on this, software? No, it was a tutorial.

I inserted the “Getting Started” floppy disk and heard my first “boing.” The disk whirred and churned and finally “Welcome to Macintosh” appeared on the screen. Personality! I wasn’t in love with a computer but I was sure enamored with it.

The tutorial worked like this: You would play the tape and it would tell you all about your new Macintosh. There was this fantastic guitar music and it just felt, well like nothing I had experienced with my Trash-80 nor my Atari 800 that was for sure!.

After a bit, the tape would instruct you to interact with the computer and pause the tape. You would do a task on the computer, such as moving the mouse, or even the concept of picking it up and noticing the cursor didn’t move while the mouse was in the air. Then the software would instruct you to press play on the tape deck and the next section would begin.

This was the most reassuring, comforting initial experience I had ever had. To say it was profound was an understatement. I believe to this day that these first few hours with the Macintosh cemented my life long affinity for the Apple brand. These people were not snobs; They just wanted to do things right.

Over the next week I learned to use MacPaint and MacWrite, as well as spending far too much time organizing documents with folders. I spent money on more floppy disks, which were about $15 a piece at the time. I took the disks to the store to print them out.

Back at school, our computer “lab” (which was a closet on the boy’s upper north hall) became well known. We had a Commodore 64, an Apple II and an Apple Macintosh all crammed into an 6’x5′ space. Of course mine took the least amount of space of all 🙂

I was only able to write documents as I could not afford a printer, so using the Macintosh was more of an experience in learning why this machine was so different in terms of user interface and design. Upon graduation, a good friend of mine wrote a story in MacWrite and saved it on my original floppy. I still have that floppy and story somewhere.

I purchased a copy of Microsoft Basic as it was the only thing I could afford to write software with. I wrote a music program and a simple spreadsheet application to track gas mileage. That summer my family headed out on a 2 month trip across America in our motor home. I brought the Mac along because it was portable and could operate using the power in the motor home. I used it to track the mileage of our trip as well as our friends at every stop.

Halfway through the trip we arrived at my grandmother’s farm in southern Missouri. I left the Mac on the driver’s seat of the motor home as it was safest there.

Three days later a tornado hit within 4 miles and had the motor home rocking and the rest of us in the basement. When the storm had passed, I rushed out to great relief to see not only the motor home safe, but the computer still resting on the front seat.

Then I picked the Mac up and out from the vents poured seemingly buckets of water! Apparently the window for the bed above the driver’s seat had been left open and the front of the motor home was drenched.

I panicked at first; my 6 month old $2,500 computer was full of water! I then realized that because it was simply rain water, from the middle of nowhere Missouri, it likely had a low sodium count. I could not open the case because it used a crazy new “torx” screw which nobody I knew had seen, so I got the hair dryer and for 3 hours I blew air through the side, back, top vents as well as the floppy port.

Finally, I figured this was as good as it was going to get and powered the Mac on. “Boing!” it said as it welcomed me once again. That computer never failed and ran perfectly for another year until it was stolen, but that is another story……..