Happy 40th Anniversary, Mac!

[This is an updated repost from the 25th and 30th anniversaries.]

It’s the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the first Macintosh.

I first used a Mac back in high school in New Zealand, where I volunteered as head student librarian. The school had mostly Apple IIe computers, but bought one of the newfangled Macintosh computers in 1984. It was an original 128K Mac, with a single internal floppy drive. Back then, the OS, an application, and data fit on a single 400K disk. We used MacWrite for letters and other documents, MacPaint for occasional graphics, and the OverVUE database for some records… though not a full book catalog.

I bought my first Mac four years later while at university, in 1988. It was a Macintosh Plus, one of the new platinum-colored models. And I even had a second 800K floppy drive:

Later, I added an external hard drive (I think it was 10 MB, though I could be wrong), a modem, and a mageno-optical drive:

Those were the days… working on a 9-inch 512 x 342 pixel monochrome display… which is actually not much more than the original iPhone screen resolution, to give some perspective.

Later I bought a Macintosh II, which I subsequently upgraded internally to be a Macintosh IIx. Then I used a number of other models provided by a Dejal client.

When my wife and I got married, Apple gave us a PowerBook 150 as a wedding present, since we had met while using Macs with the fledgling internet. Our wedding was covered on local TV news and newspapers. Yep, meeting over the internet was a novel concept back then:

Just before we moved to the US, we bought a clamshell iBook G3, then later an iMac G4:

Over time, I had a PowerMac G5, a 17″ MacBook Pro, and a 27” iMac, and others. I’m currently using an M1 Pro-powered MacBook Pro.

All in all, it’s been a great 40 years. I’ve enjoyed using and owning the various Macs over this time, and developing software for them since 1988, and supporting myself as a Mac developer since 1991. I look forward to many more years. Happy birthday, Mac!