What was your very first Apple product you ever owned?

TidBITS Talk
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I remember the first Apple products I got in 1987 in my 3rd year at university as a History major, was a Mac 512k machine. It had only one internal 400k floppy drive, which is why I had a 400k external one. I used the internal drive to boot from and have the programs on, and the external drive to save my documents to. The printer I had with it was an Apple ImageWriter 1.

The Mac Plus had just come on the market then, which is why I got this sales floor demo setup at some sort of discount [not that I currently remember what it cost?]

At the time, not only had I never up until then touched a computer, but I didnā€™t even know how to type.

Itā€™s amazing what you can get done, at times of high stress, as I was in back then. The version of MacWrite that I was using as a word processor at the time didnā€™t even have a spell checker. But even then, I remember that the Mac had the reputation of being easier to learn as a new user. And sure enough, despite some very painful learning experiences with it, I managed with it as best I could, under the circumstances. This was a time before Windows was available; so if not a Mac, it was DOS as an operating system.

Wow, how Apple computer and their products have changed over the years!

In grad school, I remember getting an SE/30, and using the one and only expansion slot, to in time, add a Radius Pivot grey-scale monitor that allowed me to see an entire page of typed text. Lost the monitor in a move some 20 years ago, but, still have the computer that I should try rebooting again as itā€™s on my network.

Since then, Iā€™ve been collecting old Macs that Iā€™ve put on my network to use as storage. Not the most efficient use of physical shelf space, but when people are otherwise going to throw-out their old machine, it provides some free storage, so has been helpful.

Even back in 1987, I remember the Apple operating system was setup for networking; that I donā€™t remember being built into DOS?

I currently use 3 main Macs, and have 4 old CRT iMacs on my network, along with an old 21ā€ iMac and my old 27ā€ iMac that Iā€™ve got to get going again on my network.

Iā€™m currently using a Studio Mac that Santa gave me on Dec. 18th, just in time for Christmas.

My current problem is storage. Iā€™ve simply been buying WD external hard drives as my storage needs have required, and am now at some 25 external drives ā€¦

If it wasnā€™t so expensive, Iā€™d get a Synology NAS. Otherwise, Iā€™m open to anyoneā€™s suggestion of how to contain and expand storage?

Long live the Apple OS!

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Back in 19-whatever I bought a IICX and and HP DeskWriter, a NEC color monitor. Itā€™s hard to remember that far back.

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Apple IIc w/ Monitor IIc and Scribe printer. Bought in October 1984 at the Robinson Barracks PX. I had to choose between it, an Apple IIe, and a Mac. I chose the IIc because it came with the printer included. The next week I went back and bought an external Disk IIc. A couple of years later I installed an Applied Engineering Z-RAM Ultra 3 and now haw a whopping 1 MB of RAM! When I returned stateside in 1988, I had the IIc upgraded to work with the Apple 3.5 Drive.

In 1992 I bought a Mac LC and the optional Apple IIe Card. Next was a Mac 605, then a SuperMac C500, an iMac G3 Rev B, an iMac G4, an iMac G5, and my Mid-2011 iMac that Iā€™m still using. For portable Macs, I started with a PowerBook 145B, then a PowerBook G4 (15 inch 1.5/1.33 GHz), a Mid-2011 MacBook Air (11 inch), Mid-2015 MacBook Pro (15 in), and a 2022 M2 MacBook Air. I still have all of the computers Iā€™ve owned except the Mac 605.

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If you mean a Quadra 605, Iā€™d rate that as one of the most underappreciated Macs. Easy to open and upgrade, and surprisingly fast, especially when running Mac OS 8.1, an equally underappreciated OS.

I had one in my department at a global pharmaceutical company. It ran trouble-free for years: AppleShare IP for basic file service, Sassafras KeyServer for enabling network software licenses, and various combinations of FileMaker, Lasso, and WebStar (eventually just FileMaker) to serve dynamic web pages. Fond memories.

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Yep, that was it. I gave it to my brother for his familyā€™s use but it ended up dying.

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Apple II, Imagewriter.

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Thinking further about it, I have to make a slight correction.

The first Apple product I ever owned was an Apple wrench.

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These little doodads came with peripheral cards for the Apple ][, ][+, and //e. They were designed to fit the 3/8" screws that held the ports on the back in place so you could plug the associated peripherals in.

The summer before I started high school, my old seventh-grade science teacher, knowing how much I was into computers, pointed me to a summer job setting up and tearing down Apple ][s for a program the school system called Summer Tech. These were classes for the public in a wide variety of computer basics.

They were held at one central site, and the computers were collected from schools all over the city. I was part of a team that went to the schools to collect computers before the program and set them up at the site before the program started, maintained the computers during the program, and tore them down and took them back to their schools after the program ended.

In many cases, the computers we collected didnā€™t have all the cards they would need for the classes (most common omission was printer cards), so we had to add them. These wrenches came with each card. The IT team setting things up collected them. It became a badge of honor to have a huge number of them hanging from a ring.

We never actually used them to fasten the screws, of course. We all carried 3/8" hex drivers to do it properly. But collecting them was fun. I still have two: a black one and a silver one. They serve as a memento of my first tech job.

This was about a year before I got my //c, so technically this was the first Apple product I ever owned.

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My first was the Bell & Howell black Apple ][+ with 2 floppy drives

Very much like this one:

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Apple IIe with dual floppy drive but the simple green on black monochrome screen. I wrote my first BASIC lines on that box. I later ran into a language proposal that instead of GOTO had COMEFROM. :joy:

The IIe was built like a tank too.

But Apple and I didnā€™t really thoroughly click until the Mac. The 128, 512, 512e, Plus, SE, SE/30, and IIci followed in quick succession. To this day I still hold the SE/30 and IIci in a very special place. So much power. Such versatility. And elegant too!

Fun fact: for both the SE and IIci Apple offered a hardware upgrade program. You could send it in to turn your SE into an SE/30 (did not do that myself) and your IIci to turn it into a Quadra 700 (my brother did that). I believe they also offered a II/IIx ā†’ IIfx conversion. Good times. :slightly_smiling_face:

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My first Apple product was a Macintosh IIx (with Apple RGB CRT monitor), purchased in 1988 ā€“ and I still have it and it still runs!

It also has an AST 286 co-process that runs DOS (talk about back to the future), with an Apple-branded 5-1/4ā€ floppy drive

But, it takes up a lot of space and Iā€™m hoping to find it a new home (a computer museum or something like that). Anyone have any suggestions?

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Interesting machine. I remember having pretty much the same equipment (including the AST card) in an office that was one of my first consulting projects as a college student.

One problem with a lot of vintage equipment is that it often doesnā€™t survive transport via the major carriers. Whether itā€™s shattered cases or parts shaken loose, itā€™s a common issue. If you donā€™t miraculaously have the original packing materials, consider having the equipment packaged professionally by someone familiar with shipping sensitive electronics.

One option might be taking it to a vintage computer meetup. For example, the Vintage Computer Federation organizes events in several parts of the US and Canada. Perhaps they can offer some advice.

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An iPod Touch. My wifeā€™s first was the original iPad.

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My first Apple product was an Apple IIe which I purchased around 1982 to run a physics experiment on my second postdoc. The closely allied astronomy dept. used Apple IIeā€™s as controllers running FIG Forth, which gave them easy access to the expansion cards. I followed their practice and ran my experiment using Forth on an Apple IIe. A few years later, I reworked most of the Forth software using 6502 assembler, which gave me a 10x speedup. It was fairly straightforward to build a peripheral card using a Vector prototype board (based mainly on a 6522 VIA) for the interface. I therefore never learned the standard way to use a IIe with an Apple OS.

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My first was also an LCII with an 80MB hard drive and 8MB of RAM. I had moved from a BBC B, which used audio cassette tape storage. I honestly thought I would never, ever fill up that 80MB HD!

The computer came with a fantastic printed manual, which I read through twice and a floppy disc which showed you how to use the mouse by dragging items around in an office. Both were outstanding!

I also bought an HP 550 inkjet printe,r which was also a massive step-up from my Epson FX-80 dot-matrix printer.

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Back in those days, there really wasnā€™t an OS worth speaking of. You had ROM BASIC and DOS extensions for accessing floppy disks. Everything else was part of your app.

It wasnā€™t until Apple invented ProDOS (1983) that the Apple II series got what we today would consider an operating system.

(Well, the Apple III had SOS (1980), upon which ProDOS was based, but that wasnā€™t for the Apple II platform.)

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My first computer was an Apple II+. My son and I got started with programming with Robowar.

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Original 128k Mac, 1984

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Have to join inā€¦

Working as ā€˜informalā€™ IT in a wonderful company in Kobe ā€“ my job was actually training ā€“ my first Apple products are mixed up in my memory with those I bought for others in our management group. I did start with an Apple IIc, like many others here; and went from there to one of the original Mac IIā€™s which I bought with a (gigantic!) 80MB drive and 8MB of RAM. But I bought others IIcxā€™s, and for my beloved boss a IIci with a Radius Pivot Display.

(Meanwhile through all of this Adam and TidBITS generally saved me time after time!)

That Mac II lasted me through 10 years, with accelerator boards and other add-ins. Along with it after a disturbance in the earthā€™s crust I had a PowerBook 540 with a PowerPC CPU clip on; which did me until I lashed out for a Power Mac G4 MDD, which ran from 2002 - 2016! (Who says Apple products are expensive!)

Along the way with that I had a series of MB Airs, the final Intel one still on 32bit Mohave. But now, like many here I think, itā€™s the M laptops with (in my case) that pivoting ALogic 4K display. Currently Iā€™m on M3, awaiting M6!

What a trip itā€™s been!

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@josehill, the Vintage Computer Federation is an excellent suggestion (Iā€™ve never heard of them before). Iā€™ll check it out.

You wrote, ā€œIf you donā€™t miraculously have the original packing materialsā€¦ā€œ But I do! No miracle (I used to meticulously keep every box that equipment came in). Those boxes are huge, and contain the original styrofoam moulded inserts. And they take up a LOT of space in a closet that my wife wants back. We down-sized five years ago, hence the pressure to find someone to adopt the gear.

Crossing my fingers that the Vintage Computer Federation can help these find a good home.

Thank you.

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Similar path for me: started with an SE (internal 20MB HDD and SCSI built-in) then a few years later SE/30 which I upgraded with that internal board that gave it 24 bit and also gray scale on the monitor.