My list:
• MacSE [FDHD version]
… later accelerated/upped to 40 Mhz '030, 16 MB RAM, 160 MB HD
• 7100/80
… later accelerated/upped to 300 Mhz G3, 136 MB RAM, 2.1 + 3.2 GB HDs
• Wall Street 14" 300/DVD
… later accelerated/upped to 500 MHz G4, 512 MB RAM, paired internal 60 GB HDs
• PowerBook G4 17 / 1.67 GHz [DL DVD version] - two of these
• MacBook Pro i7 SandyBridge 2.3 GHz 17" - two of these
I still have all but the SE sitting right here next to me. Just booted them in fact 
My first Mac was #17 in the computer lab at my middle school. I’m not entirely sure why we had such a lab, since all they did was run a certain educational software program that taught math and English, but it was the same stuff we were taught in other classes. And I don’t mean as an extension of what we already did–it was a completely separate program. The computer were locked down enough that you couldn’t really do anything else on them.
Anyways, those computers were a Mac II of some sort, the all-in-one models. I didn’t use another actual Mac until the G5 was out. That was in the computer lab at college. I mostly used it because I knew that no one would legitimately need to use it during the day, since only one class used Mac software. And I would use the G4 iMacs, not the new G5s.
That said, I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the interface, as I went through a phases of wanting to emulate nearly everything. So I had emulated a Mac on my computer before, even though I never really got any decent software to justify this. But I did like the interface enough that I actually downloaded a program that gave me the menu bar on top of windows, back on a Windows 98 computer.
That said, that program didn’t have all the eccentricities of the Mac OS. It still gave me a start button and task bar. Programs still closed when I closed their window. Plus, the computer techs who fixed my computer back then are pretty sure it came with a virus that screwed up my modem. (Though, I’m not sure they were all that good at their job since they “fixed” it by a factory reset.)
The main thing I liked about Mac OS X were the animations, making the interface feel fluid. What I hated was a single folder that contained every single application, instead of an organized, hierarchical system, and the keyboard-only things that were hidden away, instead of left to be discovered–an Apple design philosophy I still don’t get to this day. The thing about Windows is that I never, ever needed to read external information to learn how to use it.
Honestly, I think an OS that combined the best of both OSes would be amazing. At first it seemed like the direction Microsoft was going with Windows 7 (albeit only half done). Unfortunately, it seems that it is slowly removing what makes Windows good with its new paradigm. It may just be better to get a Mac and get some sort of Application Menu program you can stick in the dock.
You know, you can organize your Applications way way you want, don’t you?
I have many subdirectories in my /Applications folder.
Also, most keyboard shortcuts are indicated next to the menu item they control - if you look next to the Edit->Cut menu, it shows **cmd-x **right there.
My first one for work was the PowerMac 6000. Our applications were running on Linux boxes ( Sun I believe ) and the Mac’s were used to access them. The IT staff preferred Windows and would seldom offer any assistance on system/hardware problems so we were on our own until our boss hired a Mac person for our group. The IT guys made a lot of noise but we - and our boss - stood firm. So instead of switching to pc’s and paying tribute to a large IT staff we had one guy to do it all. He was a bit like the Maytag repairman - just waiting for a call. 
My other fond memory was buying 250 shares of Apple stock in 1991. Still have them too…
Never actually used one, I was and is certainly more of a PC guy, but I could that it had a nice GUI and graphics. That kind of thing pushed the envelope for the whole industry.
I have been a Mac software developer since 1989. I started with a IIcx moved to a IIfx and have owned probably 25 different models. I currently have 3 Macs.
The Mac has been my source of income for most of my adult life.
I loved this!
I’ve been using Apple products since the first Apple ][ back in the late '70s.
My “first Mac” was actually an Atari 1040ST with a Mac emulator, mainly to play Mac-only (at the time) games like SimCity or The Fool’s Errand. The only real Mac I have owned is an iMac I bought a few years ago for developing iOS apps.
I was lucky enough to be a young kid during the golden age of the Apple IIe. Games like Word Munchers and Oregon Trail were probably my favorite part of elementary school.
Probably my favorite Apple memory, though, was from middle school. I somehow became known as a kid who could “fix” computers for teachers (I have no earthly memory of what I did to fix these machines or what kinds of problems they had), and so I was often allowed to play around on the computers that were in a lot of classrooms. I had also managed to get myself a laminated, permanent hall pass that even let me into the building early! It was a nerd’s treasure.
Anyway, I had a rubber-banded stack of probably six or seven floppy disks that contained a bootleg installation of Civilization. I could play it on any Mac in the school, so long as I remembered how to beat the early DRM (you essentially needed to know the early tech tree by heart, and I totally did).
You know that’s not entirely true, don’t you? Try moving Safari, or iTunes, or iChat/Messages to another folder or even to a subfolder and see what happens. (Hint: “Safari can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by Mac OS X.”) There are even a fair number of third party applications that won’t work unless they are left in the default location.
Well, yes and no.
Apple wants those apps in /Applications, but they can be moved if you really want to. It might require a trip to the Terminal to do it, though.
As for third-party apps, I’ve never met one that broke if it was moved. Not to say that a poorly written one wouldn’t, but it’s rare.
The first computer I think I ever touched was a mac. No scrub that, it was a ZX81. We’ll just leave that there…
As a graphic designer, I started on Macs from 1989, and have never, ever, had anything else. I’m not even sure I’d know how to switch a PC on. C drive, what the hell is that?!
Back in the mid 90s, if you remember, Apple was in trouble. One of my clients was a software developer for Microsoft. This company HATED Apple with a passion, and made endless boring jokes about how Apple were going bust and all us poncy designers would have to learn DOS, or whatever was the PC thing at the time. We were genuinely quite terrified at the prospect.
Then Apple brought out the iMac. We laughed last and we laughed hard.
Since you are moving the actual applications, and not just shortcuts, I was afraid to mess with any of them. Plus it wasn’t my computer, and the Macs didn’t have separate accounts. And I just don’t like having to open a window in order to run apps, period.
And the keyboard commands I’m talking about aren’t the ones that activate a menu item. Those would be things that you can do with mouse or keyboard. I’m talking about the ones that let you type in the name of a program, let you cycle through programs, or bring up widgets. These are (or were) keyboard only things. When I found out about them way after the fact, I lamented not using them. (I’m lucky I did read about zoom, since it allowed me to zoom in on applications that needed to go fullscreen but wouldn’t.)
Was the iMac a real big splash for Apple? I remember Apple piddling along and fairly niche until OS X and, more importantly, the iPod. I don’t even remember much about the first iMac other than I thought they looked a little, um, loud for my tastes (if I’m thinking of the right one–the ones with the jewel colors on the sides of the monitor). Our office just had G4s and I think we even had a cube around for awhile. (I did like that G4 Cube, though.)
I’ve always been one of those people who wants to organize my bloody computer the way I want it. Here’s my experience as far as putting apps where you want them:
Apple-branded apps: generally work fine from anywhere but absolutely will NOT update unless you leave them in /Applications. (So I put an alias to the real ones at the location I want them to be at)
Others: work fine from anywhere and generally will update fine BUT the damn updaters will, 75% of the time, stick the updated app in /Applications, and then you have to move the damn thing once again to where you want it.
In both cases “where you want it” can be a subfolder of /Applications, a folder (or subfolder thereof) that you created at the root of the main hard drive in lieu of using /Applications, or a folder on a different volume entirely. You can put applications within /Users/you/ but then they won’t be accessible to any other users.
For launching purposes (since the Dock is pretty lame and next to useless for folks who use dozens and dozens of different applications instead of 5-15 of them) I still use X-Assist even though it hasn’t been updated in a long time. Apple has never understood launchers and all of their native ones have sucked as far back as I can remember. I used OnCue in System 6, switched to Apollo for System 7, then to the more easily maintained OtherMenu. X-Assist has the same basic functionality, a fully customizable hierarchical popdown menu to select your app as a submenu of application category (or however you choose to organize yours… that’s how I do mine).
When the Mac first came out, I was living in Vancouver and I rushed right down to the store that sold them (cash money in my hands) and was all set to buy one.
I asked if I could try it before I bought it and they said, “Sure … no problem”.
I was a programmer back then and so I wrote a little program in the Basic language to count just like …
1, 2, 3, … etc.
I could stop the program at any time and it would report to me how far it had progressed.
I did this to see how fast it was when running the Basic language. The only other programming language it could run was Assembler and that would take me a couple of weeks to learn how to use that.
Anyway, I started it running and about 15 seconds later, I stopped it to see just how far it had progressed.
In 15 seconds, it had progressed from 1 to 20.
I showed this to the people in the store and asked if maybe there was something wrong with it or whether I had done something wrong.
They looked at each other and scratched their heads and asked me, “Ummm … why would you think that? Is there a problem with the machine?”
I blinked twice and thanked them very kindly for letting me try it. Then, I quietly said a little prayer and thanked my lucky stars that I had tried it before I gave them the cash.
I had read a book about the Mac before I went to buy one and it sure was a loverly machine. But it sure was slow. Real slow! Snail speed slow!
Oh Well! Hello Mac! Goodbye Mac! F. you, Mac!
I knew what an Interpretter was and I knew that the Basic language was an Interpretter and it was very unfair to compare its speed with something like Turbo Pascal on the IBM PC.
By the way, in those same 15 seconds, Turbo Pascal would have started counting and after about one second, it would have reached two billion and then aborted with an error because two billion was the maximum number it could have reached.
Oh well. Live and Learn. Hello Mac! Goodbye Mac! F. you, Mac!
The problem was that I needed my computer to be able to count.
To be fair, the Mac was never designed to count in Basic language. It was designed primarily as a graphics machine and when it came to that, it excelled. It was the best in the world at that time.
But, I needed my computer to be able to count - at least faster than I could count. I mean, if it couldn’t do that, why would I need it?
I could always just count by myself and I wouldn’t need any computer. You know what I mean?
To be fair, the Mac could count just as fast as the IBM PC in its own Assembler language.
That, indeed, sounds really, really weird. I can’t see any reason why a BASIC counting program would take that long to run. The MacBASIC benchmarks I could find from the time suggest that it was faster than Microsoft BASIC, although your exact test wasn’t performed (but unless the print-to-screen routines were somehow remarkably slow–and who knows, maybe it was tricky given the GUI–I can’t see why it would take that long. In that case, the problem is not in the counting, it’s in the printing.)
It also looks like MacBasic has a bit of a history, with the official MacBasic never getting past beta, but apparently there was an MS BASIC for Macintosh that Microsoft released?
I’m having a hard time piecing the BASIC story together, as I don’t recall BASIC on any of the Macs that I’ve used, but I don’t think I ever used the mid-80s Macs.
It really wasn’t. There was a splashy ad campaign (“She comes in colors”), but it was largely considered a joke except among hardcore Mac enthusiasts. Remember the “iFruit” running gag in Foxtrot? Like you said, Macs didn’t really start coming of age until the first version of OS X came out.