It Started On a Mac
In the wake of the news about Steve Jobs, I have seen a lot of people talking about their first Mac and what not, so I will take a moment to tell my story. I never met Steve, but he has touched my life in a way that’s so profound I don’t think I can entirely express it in words.
I must have been about 8 and it was christmas, I remember we were at my grandparent’s house and we had opened all the presents, but some how missed this one large box from my uncle. I remember the tag said, “from santa,” we tore into the box and inside was an Apple 2e. Included with the machine we had the keyboard that the machine was built into, the monitor, a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well as a color monitor. My uncle also included a bunch of software. We used to play Oregon Trail all the time, we used that machine a lot.
The next machine we got was an AST with a 133mhz cpu and 16mb of ram. I remember that machine cost around $2k dollars, that was the first machine we had the internet on, with it’s included 24bps modem through Internet Direct. I even remember the first piece of software I ever bought for that machine, Doom 2 from Computer City for $10. That computer later went with my sister to college. After the AST we bought a Gateway 2000 with a 333mhz pentium 2 cpu and 128mb of ram, compared to the AST the Gateway was a demon. The Gateway broke a lot and their included tech support would just format the machine whenever we would take it in, so I just started fixing it. That would later lead to me building and selling custom computers with some friends in High School.
It wasn’t until about 2 years ago or so that I went back to Apple. Up until then I was a PC and quite happy being so, I had been hanging out with the Social Media elite of San Antonio and just about all of them used Macs exclusively. My brother and I, were blogging for MySA at the time and one of our friends was the manager of the Apple store in North Star mall, he suggested we come down to the store and put the machines through hell to see how much they could take. We set up a time and went down there, we did everything we could think of to these machines and nothing crashed and they were still fast. I remember in particular being impressed with the Mac Mini, it was so small and fast and the price compared to the other machines I found to be quite fair. After I filed my income tax I had some money left over so I bought a Mac Mini (in fact that is what I am writing this on). I was tired of having to fix my PC all the time which was a frankenstein that I had built and was fast for about the first year and then just started running like crap, also I had to reinstall Windows every 6 months or so to keep it stable and fast. I wanted a small machine that would allow me to do the things I wanted without me having to fix it all the time and with the Mac Mini that is exactly what I got.
I know that story was longer than I had meant it to be and can you believe that is the abridged version? Technology plays a huge role in my life, it is one of my life’s biggest passions and at times biggest headache, but I wouldn’t change a thing if I could and to think it all started with a Mac, thanks Steve.
Photo Credit: Vectronic’s Apple World
