When was the first time you used a Mac?

When was the first time you used a Mac? What Model? What did you use it for and what did you think about the Mac?

The first time I used Mac was Dec 5 (or 6th, not sure), 1985. I think it was a “fat Mac” 512k. I rented it by the hour at a copy shop in Berkeley, CA.
I needed a last minute program insert for a concert.
For me, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) was an amazing, revolutionary advancement and the then nascent Desktop Publishing movement was a game changer.
My mind was blown and I fell in Love with the Mac.

Here’s my back story…
I have a very long history of tech involvement, publishing, AV and live performance support. Really began in grade school in the 60’s.
This expanded in High School and University. I have co-founded 4 non-profits that use cultural performance as an organizing tool for human rights and peace.
My wife is a singer/songwriter, graphic artist and teacher. She was a graphics editor for a weekly newspaper prior to 85 when we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area; Oakland, Berkeley.
I used to typeset on a Compugraphic system, and to this day still have a light table, hand waxer, drafting machine, and graphic arts supplies.
For folks who have never seen traditional typesetting equipment, you basically have a very large work station; think NASA launch computers from the 60s, that had a mono chrome monitor, mono spaced type, built in keyboard, and you needed to code in each change to type styles, and was limited in Type faces and size. It also had very limited memory, so nothing got stored for long. When you were ready to “print” the machine spun up and light would shine through film strips onto photographic paper that then had to go through a chemical bath just like making a print in wet photography. You didn’t see your mistakes until it came out of the soup. Oops, 4 paragraphs of italic type because you forgot to code plain text.

In 1985 after moving to the Bay Area, I took over the graphics and tech portion of large concert to be held on Dec 7th. I convinced the organization to improve/expand the concert program and my wife and I designed and laid it out for the offset printer. At the very last minute, 2 days before event, it was decided to add an insert and a mailing return envelope. Instead of just having a simple typed appeal letter, I volunteered to do a more polished version.
Way too late to send to normal typesetter, printer, so I went to a copy shop in Berkeley where I knew you could rent computers by the hour. Had never used a Mac before.
After staring at a little beige box, a keyboard connected by a thin cable, and a very strange looking rectangular box with a button and cable for over 5 minutes, a Goddess of Kindness sitting next to me (most likely a CAL student); took pity on me and showed me how to use MacWrite (very basic text writing program included as free Mac software).
Here for the first time in my life I could type and see on screen what it would look like when printed. Simply mind blowing. You could add text box borders, graphics, change fonts, styles, sizes and see the results.
I think this revolutionary change is now taken for granted, but for me, I was floored. I produced in a couple of hours an insert that was professional quality and went home with the finished, copied product. I couldn’t wait to show my wife. I also immediately realized that typesetting equipment and shops that cost $100,000 and more were dead.

Berkeley was an amazing place to be for Mac users. I wanted to learn how to use them and I was told (maybe by the Goddess of Kindness herself) about Berkeley Macintosh User Group (BMUG) that provided free help to anyone wanting to learn about Macs. I started going to the meetings and spent the next 7 years or so hanging out whenever I could. BMUG was fantastic, and Apple’s TeamMac were often around. Learned lots. Lots of big names/companies came and gave demos at the general meetings. Each meeting was packed with 200-300 people and sometimes it was standing room only.

MacWrite quickly gave way to Ready Set Go, then Quark Express. I also had Aldus PageMaker, but never liked it. I had to use it for some of the organizations I worked with, but PageMaker used the metaphor of the old typesetting, then layout and I always preferred to type directly into the layout.

I continued to rent Macs and eventually bought my first Mac SE20 in 1987. Can you imagine a whole 20MB of hard drive space, who could ever fill it up? Got the education discount package with an ImageWriter color dot matrix printer.
Took me about a week before I cracked the case and starting hacking and modifying the software/hardware. Really wanted the MacII but couldn’t afford it.

My first color Mac was also my first “Hacintosh” (that name didn’t exist then). I had a friend with an Atari ST and we hacked it with Mac ROMs with the help of a TeamMac person. There were several people in BMUG involved in the the project and the EPROM we created became quite popular in its day.

Over the years many Macs have come and gone, MacII FX, Bondi, PowerMac, MacPro and several laptops. Still think Apple’s are the best hardware and software. I also have used Windoze and Linux. The Atari was my first experience with digital music creation and my first digital video was on another friend's Amiga.

So that’s my story, what’s yours?
Happy 30 years of computing,
Greg

I'm a retired band director, but also have done a lot of arranging. I began doing arrangements for the local symphony and bought my first Mac in November 1989 to run Finale, the first pro-level music notation software mainly to avoid the tedium and errors of copying all those instrumental parts by hand. My wife had seen a Mac and HyperCard, and Finale only ran on Macs, so that's what we got - also a Mac SE20. I learned Finale but it was a bit ahead of the hardware of the day, as you'll see. I did my first orchestra arrangement in Feb. 1990 on a very tight deadline. Oh yes, I also was a saxophone player in the local musicians union and was one of the locals hired to play for the Ringling Brothers Circus that year.

So, I finished the arrangement on a Friday night and set the little Mac to "extract" the individual parts (automatically transposed to the correct key for each instrument - AMAZING!) and went to bed. The next morning it was still processing! So, I had no choice but to leave it working and went off on Saturday to play three performances of the circus. I came home late Saturday night and it was STILL not finished! I went to bed, and some time in the night it finally finished. I calculated that it took 36 hours to do the parts extraction, but it finished the job and never crashed. I printed the parts on my ImageWriter dot matrix printer, delivered them to a Wed. rehearsal, and the orchestra played the piece on Friday.

I later did over 100 orchestrations of choir anthems for a religious publishing company, and that part extraction process that took 36 hours eventually, through a combination of Mac speed and software improvements, became possible to do in about 30 seconds!!!

That led to many other exploits and eventually to a connection with Apple doing Ed Tech demos as a member of their Apple Distinguished Educator program, and just today I ordered a top spec iMac 5K Retina. But I still have that little Mac SE in a closet at home. Something that amazing doesn't come along very often in life.

short after I bought my very first computer, a Commodore C64 ('bread box'), a colleague brought his Mac into the studio, … 1986? He paid 8000DM which was a silly amount of money - esp. when you don't need a computer; he was never able to tell, what he was USING it for, … he was an engineer, guess a severe case of "shut up and grab my money".

Later, mid-90ies, in the Ad industry, DTP was the next big thing, Quark Express, laserrpinter, and - I was copy writer - got my first Performa, later a Mac Portable (anyone remembering this design fail??).

My very first own/self paid/private Mac was a Powerbook 100 ('the Sony Mac'), 1991/92?

For a short time a QuadraAV (???) - fried the motherboard due to my experiments to feed video into it :woohoo:

Cube (stolen, with my Newton), MacMini CD (still in use by son), actually MacMini i5...
next? probably iMac with some beast of a GPU ....

Back in the early to mid 1980's, the Apple IIe was the school computer, we spend about a year fundraising for the Apple IIe, the school bought 2...

After that, I tried using the colored monitor with the round base version, found OS9 confusing, but when Final Cut Studio 2 came out, I bought the 2nd generation 15in Macbook pro, this was right after Apple started with selling 15in macbook pro with 4GB RAM as standard...This was the hideous Nvdidia graphics/motherboard problem laptop...My mac was repaired so many times...

Kept it going with gaffer tape, DIY fan repairs until the 13in retina macbook pro was released late 2013...

Not for one second do I consider this retina a professional device, nor do I support the path Apple Inc is on with the hardware range, I love Final Cut Pro, both 6 and now X.

The idea of buying and having updates is great, if Adobe had gone this route, I might have stayed with PC and Lost10...Renting is such a terrible idea, be it cars, houses or software...

Late '80s, returning to finish college, and the hottest home computer for students at the time was the Mac Plus. With a Rodine 20MB external hard drive. And an Apple dot matrix printer, I forget what they called it. But I could get ink ribbon cartridges that would print with a type of latex or plastic, so you could iron the printout onto cloth. I also had a program that took graphics, and printed them on continuous feed paper, and we cut and glued them together to do neat color printed, large signage for a local health food store. I was doing signage for some local mom & pop stores, teaching folks to use a Mac/computer, and some DTP work. Got married and my wife did DTP and editorial work full time. Until we upgraded to an Apple LC III, which blew me away.

Oh, I also did my first music composing on a computer with that old Mac Plus, and a 4 track tape recorder.

That old Rodine drive sounded like a 747 during take off. It took a good 3 minutes at least to wind up to speed and be ready for work. And it pumped out a TON of heat. And was the site of a VCR today. But it was a HUGE amount of storage space (never filled it up) and being SCSI, was rally fast. But noisy as hell.

Used Photoshop 1 or 2 back then, also.

Then the Motorola StarMax 2400 Mac clone, that I started doing video editing with using Premiere 1 or 2. Purchased FCP the day it went on sale, and have used it ever since.

Now, through all of this, I was an IT professional, eventually becoming an engineer and project manager, then retired from all that. I made a very comfortable living off of DOS/Windows and SCO UNIX, but always came home to a Mac (or multiple Macs on occasion). While my peers made fun of me, they went home to "fix" their own machines that never worked correctly for more than a day or two. I came home, relaxed, and used a computer that worked pretty much non-stop. I never had virus problems, extremely rare hard drive crashes, and always did creative visual and auditory work.

Today, I'm scaling things back, being minimalist in my work space, and getting much more done with many more easier to use tools that open universes of new abilities to me. Yes, scaling back to the basics feels good now.

I think the first Mac I used was the Macintosh IIvx when I started working at a pre-press/DTP/Printer place in 93, I believe. I had a Commodore 64 in the 80s but sold it to buy an electric guitar. When I started working on the Mac, that was the first time I used a computer with a mouse

My first own Mac was a Performa 475.

The first Mac I ever used was the original Mac 128K, at the university; probably one of the first that came to Portugal. That was in 1985. I remember that compiling a relatively simple program took several minutes.

I also remember the 10MB and then 20MB hard drives that seemed huge, and freed us from all the disquette juggling...

My first privately owned mac was the Quadra 840AV - I actually did some (very modest) video with it. At the time I saw a mind-blowing presentation of serious editing on the same machine (they even did chroma keying!) - using a $5000 Nubus (!) card by Radius (I think) called "DIgital Film" (I never owned one of those, of course).

My first experience with computers was using a huge IBM main frame attached to many components in a gym size room. We talk to this machine using piles of punched cards (FORTRAN) it was 1969. I though i would HATE computers for the rest of my life…

Then the MACINTOSH 128K came out with it’s beautiful interface , MacPaint and MacWrite,i could not resist so I purchased it late 1984. I had this wonderful machine that i upgraded with a « 20 Meg HyperDrive » and a « thunderscan » for my imagewriter printer. This craziness never stopped after that for Apple Computers.

One fantastic moment was when in 1989 we met some people who created a software-hardware solution for the « Macintosh II » , you could digitize and edit video in AVR1 a codec so bad that we could not rely on the image to check if we were in audio synch, but since this thing was used to generate an EDL for our CMX suites , we did not care much as we could save so much Money in creative editing time and then almost auto-conform the entire project in the ON LINE suite.

After using many small computers I bought a PowerMacG3 Blue and White in 1999 . It is not very long after, that I was lucky to test an early version of a new editing software : Final cut pro, it was love at first site. Firewire was a clean input. Now FCPX is great on an iMac,

When my mac computers get old they become a server, then when they die or too old they just rest in my MACINTOSH collection shelves.

Have a good day on your MACintosh computer.

First computer? Yes, IBM mainframe in college with keypunch cards. Best friend later got an IBM PC (the first model to arrive in New Orleans, in fact). First computer I worked on professionally? IBM "Big Blue" with a voltmeter and soldering iron. It had a 5MB internal hard drive that weighed about 30 pounds, was about 2.5 feet in diameter, and the magnet controlling the read/write heads had to be removed with a crow bar, it was so powerful and large and heavy. Still, at that time, was going home to a Mac, that simply worked...

Anyone old enough to remember when the world wide web was text chat logs and not much else? Bulletin Boards, and they usually had their own phone numbers. Ah, dial-up modems, they won't be missed at all.

BenB wrote: … Anyone old enough to remember when the world wide web was text chat logs and not much else? Bulletin Boards, and they usually had their own phone numbers. Ah, dial-up modems, they won't be missed at all.

<rising hand>

velcro-attached modems, ahhhh… 1200bauds, right?  
when you get used to it, you could hear when connection was established.

Had a tel# in Danmark to some 'board', which later became famous anarchy.dk
Long discriptions how to build Blue Boxes, override the electricity meter in your house, cracking locks, open cars, how to grow .... plants, etc etc etc.

loooong ago ........... :silly:

Dial up..."Get off the phone, I need to phone the hairdresser/the library, find out what to take to book club" My mom to me in the middle of a download on a 28k dial up modem, that had taken the better part of 13 hours to download, and still had an hour left....

Not much has changed, only my speed is 10times faster and I still don't have a landline...200kbps over 28kbps...we call this progress!!! :lol: