Macintosh 128K (1984)… junior year in college, purchased as part of an on-campus program Apple used to indoctrinate those of us who had not yet succumbed to DOS (I was far too scrawny to schlep around a Compaq “portable”). My very first real computer (not counting the TRS-80 I borrowed for a long time from my rich friend who had quickly grown bored of it). Still, we drafted school papers on the Macintosh but had to type them on the Smith-Corona to turn them in – professors wisely said they wouldn’t lose their eyesight to ImageWriter-printed papers!
Macintosh Plus (1985-86)… soon thereafter. Got a good deal on a trade-in, but yeah, I should have found a way to keep my 128K. The Plus had a great keyboard and I discovered ResEdit on this one (this Mac Boy became a Mac… well, you know).
Macintosh SE/30… my all-time favorite. I miss it. It was on this that… I created “Shot-to-Shot” (an early film editing teaching tool using ThunderScan and ThinkTank (or was it MORE?) used by my professor)… and Andy Hertzfeld helped me muck around inside ResEdit even more deeply and shared a prototype for MultiFinder (rotating screens!) that I stress-tested a bit for him (geek flex?). I took this one to Kyoto (3 years) on the airplane as a massive carry-on in a big blue padded bag where I programmed HyperCard stacks to calculate timezone differences, learned to type in Japanese, and wrote long rambling stories about adventures in late 80s Kansai… and then it got me through law school, with giant course outlines created in MORE and double (triple!) duty burdens handled well, connected to a fax / answering machine modem. It disappeared in my parents’ divorce and, well, that was that. As I said, I miss it.
Macintosh PowerBook Duo 210 with Duo Floppy Adapter… first one used as a young(ish) licensed professional – it was cool… light… marvelous. That plus WordPerfect for Mac and I was macro-wielding unstoppable.i Everyone around me was perplexed and couldn’t figure out why I’d use that instead of a Dynabook.
Mac Clone Desktop (I can’t recall the brand… Maybe UMAX SuperMac?)… the boring “practical” one. But it was my first color screen if I recall correctly, and scratched an itch to try a desktop again. Donated it to a friend running a charity when I bought…
iBook G4 (“Snow”)… a dream. I still have this one – even though some fake “hard drive installation” blokes on Fulham Palace Road cracked the case a bit and chased me out of the store when I started to complain (it was scary I will admit). It boots quickly and still runs my favorite label-making software. Very pretty.
iMac (24-inch, Early 2009)… this felt like a real gargantua in our little London reception. Loved using the remote from across the room and watching trailers on Front Row. It survived the trip back to Tokyo and two more local moves (and two kids!) before we said goodbye in 2017.
MacBook Air (13-inch, 2011)… the first one I used in the film business. Boy, did I ever travel with that one! It felt fast and brisk… until it didn’t. Then the battery started swelling up and it wouldn’t hold a charge. I still have it… I miss using this one, too.
iMac (21.5-inch Retina, 2017, Fusion Drive)… great design – sleek and slim, quite, fast, still in use, but threatening to start showing its age. Mrs. W is the main user now and it seems just right.
MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Touch Bar!)… on which I happily type this. I know @Ace, I know, you hate the Touch Bar. And the keyboard isn’t great. But it works, it’s still fast enough for my work, and I love that Touch Bar if only for how great it looks and how much better it is with BetterTouchTool.
Plus several laptops for my daughters, who continue the Macintosh tradition in our family.
(P.S. Almost, but didn’t, buy a Cube. Dodged a bullet, yes I did.)
You are absolutely correct, Lisa! That was a Compaq portable. HERE is my PB180, along with my portable speakers, external trackball, and some kind of portable printer.
I had one of the original 128 KB Macs, which I picked up from the university computer store in 1984. I lavishly kitted it out with an external floppy drive and ImageWriter. Eventually I got a modem, which enabled me to upload some of my classwork to a server without needing to go into one of the computer labs (which were stocked with VT102 terminals, IIRC). I later upgraded that to a Mac Plus, and upgraded the RAM to 2.5 MB. Eventually I gave it to my sister, who continued using it for years. The capacitors on that original motherboard had a tendency to blow. I could have saved myself a lot of money if I had learned to solder.
1990: Mac II si and a 14" color monitor. Now that was luxury.
1996: Powerbook 1400. This was mostly for travel, and something I shared with my then-girlfriend.
1997: Power Computing clone. I forget which model. It had a PowerPC 604 chip.
2004: iBook. This was a loan from a friend that turned into a gift.
2005: iMac G5. I think I bought this after the Intel transition was announced.
2009: Intel iMac
2013: 13" MacBook Pro (Intel)
2021: 14" MacBook Pro (M1)
You guys are reminding me of the past. When I mentioned I had a Mac II I bought at Christmas 1989 for $6K, I got it with a 13" Apple RGB color monitor and a RasterOps 24-bit color card (which was $999). It was the first or one of the first 24-bit color cards on the market. It could actually show full color photographs in exceptional color and detail.
The only problem was that I had none to display on it! The only image files I had were black and white, grayscale, or 256-color GIFs. Then I went to Seybold Conference in San Francisco and one of the booths (might have been RasterOps) gave me a 1.4MB floppy disk with about a dozen full color images on it as a freebie. Each file was about 100Kb in a brand new image format called JPEG. It came with a special viewer app that opened them. I think they were 640x480 resolution. But full color!
My favorite was a bowl of fruit. I would put up that picture as though it were a screen saver and stare at it for hours. It was so lifelike it felt like you could reach out and grab an orange wedge or slice of the pineapple.
Opening any of the pictures would take 5-10 seconds. You’d actually see the image drawing as it loaded. This was on what was one of the fastest computers on the planet back then (the Mac II normally came with a 68020 CPU, but I bought it used one with a new 68030 accelerator installed).
I was thinking about this as I watched the YouTube reviews of Vision Pro showing it manipulating full iPhoto libraries of images in real-time as a floating 3D screen with a pass-through of the user’s living room in the background.
I know that sometime in the late 80s, I upgraded to a new Mac with an external color monitor. I can’t for the life of me remember what model it was; given the time period, the Mac II would be the most obvious suspect – but my very dim memories of it are with the classic Mac / Mac SE body.
After ~35 years and many moves, I haven’t kept documentation or mementos of my Mac experiences that far back; your description of your SE/30 with an external monitor made me wonder if that’s what I had.
The SE/30 came with the incredibly versatile Processor Direct Slot. There were graphics cards for that PDS that allowed for grayscale on the internal monitor as well as external 8-bit color displays up to a whopping 1024x768 on a 14".
I had forgotten about the slot details. The SE/30 shared its architecture with the IIx (recall the x denoted 68030), but while the IIx used the at the time brand new NuBus, the SE/30 stuck with PDS as the SE had already had before and the glorious IIci had later (along with the LC line and many more to come).
Some amazing machines listed in this thread. Here’s some of mine.
Work/Work Adjacent
Lisa with an external 10MB hard drive (yeah, yeah, I know, and it was technically a one month loaner, but it led to…)
Macintosh 512KE with dual drives
Mac Plus (which a worksite rented for me when I was doing typesetting on big iron machines, along with a copy of MacWorld and instructions to pick out software to produce name tags for their upcoming sales meeting…a little DB package called FileMaker 4 by Nashoba Systems did the trick)
Power Computing clone
My Stuff
Mac SE, eventually tricked out with internal card for Mobius portrait display
Quadra 650
Power Computing tower clone
Performa 6100
PowerBook 160
iMac, Bondi Blue
iMac, Grape
iMac, Blue Dalmatian
iMac 15-inch (Tensor lamp)
iBook G4
PowerBook G4 12-inch (a couple of them)
iMac 20-inch
iMac 27-inch late 2009
MacBook Pro 15-inch 2012
iMac 27-inch late 2012 (current backup)
MacBook Pro 15-inch 2015
MacBook Pro 13-inch 2017 (current)
iMac Retina 5K 27-inch 2019 (current)
Definitely a pattern with all those iMacs, but a lot of them were for my growing kids. (I got the desk lamp iMac for myself, and still think it was one of Apple’s coolest designs ever).
Most of them got cracked open and modified with additional memory, and most of them got worked into the ground and no longer functioned. I kept the SE because I know intimately how to get inside and admire the signatures that were still being embossed into the case at that time. Anyone remember the “Mac Cracker” kit?
You mean the long hex wrench with a looped handle on the end to access the recessed hex nuts holding the case together, plus the oversized spring clip “spreader” used to pry the case apart?
I’ve got one of those kits. They’re pretty terrible. I could never get the spreader to work without damaging the plastic - it was easier to just use my fingers to get the back cover off.
And the “wrench” was also pretty flimsy. After using one once, I bought a proper Torx T15 screwdriver with a 16" long shaft. Compare the two:
Much much nicer. And doesn’t strip the Torx screws. If you need to access the insides of a classic Mac today, this is something you can buy today.
For the originals, yes. By the time of the SE, if I remember correctly, Apple started installing bleeder resistors (which quickly became an industry standard at around that time). So the tube (and the big capacitors on the analog board) would self-discharge after being powered off for a short time.
You still need to discharge a CRT before working around it, because you don’t want to blindly assume that the bleeders are present and working, but the greater danger is dropping something on the tube’s neck, cracking the glass. That will completely kill it, and since nobody makes CRTs anymore, getting a replacement in good condition can be quite a challenge these days.
But, as crowded as the insides of a compact Mac are, it’s not hard to work with the computer parts without touching the analog board and CRT. I did it plenty of times on my SE.
All of that noted, and I agree that the Torx tool seemed flimsy. Never had trouble opening up my SE with those tools on multiple occasions.
Except for the first time, when I had the twin anxieties of “Am I about to break this machine?” and “Is Steve Jobs about to pounce on my neck and break my spine for opening his baby?” After that first foray, subsequent openings were much less fraught.
Me too. I suspect Apple used some kind of thread-lock compound on those screws (or they were over-torqued with power tools) because they required a lot of force the first time I removed them.
I, too, have owned many Macs over the years, including the first one (128k). While I don’t know which Mac I had at the time, but I remember joyfully paying $1100 for a 10mb hard drive.
