Apple History
Here is a nice site on Apple history. It's fun to stop and remember the Apple machines I've owned over the last 21 years.
Apple II+ , 1981 - My first computer; I bought it with one disk drive and used a TV. Learned BASIC and also wrote in Logo on it. Added memory and disk drives to it. Geez, I thought this was a cool machine. I really got into it, read tons of stuff about it, and wrote a lot of code on it. I still loved it even after I learned about CP/M computers, and for a while after the IBM PC appeared. But the PC was too powerful.
Mac 128K 1984 - Bought this guy as soon as it came out, courtesy of a very good deal Apple gave to computer store personnel. Upgraded it to 512K, then to "fat Mac" status, 1MB RAM. I saw the Mac about a month before it was announced to the public and was just bowled over.
Mac SE 1988 -- I upgraded this one to the SE/30 a year or so after I got it.
Mac IIx 1989 -- This one was a mistake; I should have waited and got a ci, which came out the same year, a much better machine. I had a color monitor on it, which was exciting -- color graphics were new to the Mac, and were really bad on PCs. I was using an AT&T PC at the time, I think.
Quadra 650 1993 -- Not a bad machine, the last good 68XXX machine they made.
PowerMac 7500 1996 -- Actually, I'm guessing here; their machines at this time were pretty blah, there were too many models and it was hard to keep them straight. It was hard to get excited about buying Macs for quite a while. I was using lots of PCs during this time, as I still am.
iMac C 1999 -- The Mac I still use; I'm due for a new one. It's a nice machine, I was really excited about it when I got it. I've upgraded the memory a couple times and am running OSX on it. But partly because I've been seduced by the IBM ThinkPad laptop I'm using, I hardly ever use it, mostly for playing music.
And there's also a great history of the Mac OS, which at various times has been either been great or awful, and sometimes both at the same time. As Microsoft did with ME, sometimes Apple has thrown too many unreliable and untested things together in a release, or let things fall through the cracks without testing. Old time Mac owners are often justifiably wary of updating. And just as things are in the Wintel world, I doubt if the current machines, running at speeds in the hundreds of megaHerz are really any faster than they were years ago. On the other hand, since there are so many things those old machines simply couldn't do, the comparison really isn't valid.[raelity bytes]
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