There’s nothing like a birthday to make you reflect and realize just how quickly time passes. Twenty five years… In the blink of an eye.

On January 24, 1984 Apple Computer released the very first Macintosh. I didn’t hear about it until I received the very first issue of Macworld magazine in March, I think it was.

Being the packrat I am, I saved and preserved that issue. That’s a scan of the cover on the left. If you click it you can see a larger version.

I had to have the Macintosh. I’d been lusting after an Apple IIe for quite a while, and couldn’t afford the ten grand for a Lisa, but this Macintosh thing was a whole new ballgame.

I went down to my local computer store… Compuware, I think it was, and happily plunked down $3300. For that princely sum I got the original Macintosh (with a whopping 128K !), an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer, and the only three, (count ‘em, THREE!), entire programs that ran on it at the time; MacWrite, MacPaint, and Multiplan(a spreadsheet program). That was it.

I still have that Macintosh and the Imagewriter and every piece of software I ever bought for it. And you know what? It still works. I never use it though. I keep it here on a shelf in my studio as a memento and a personal trophy.

I was one of the first people in Texas to own a Macintosh.

Here’s what it looked like the day I bought it on May 19th, 1984, and it’s on my original Unistation prototype workstation.

I justified the purchase of the Mac by using it to produce marketing materials to help get a government contract for my line of Unistation workstations (which I was awarded a year later and had to refuse, but that’s another story).

In the early days I designed, built, and sold solid oak furniture for the Macintosh. Below is a shot of some of those items. I sold a bunch of these tower stands, and rolltop disc storage boxes to the very first CompUSA store, when it opened on Beltway Rd, off Beltline Rd in far North Dallas. I was about to spend a big chunk of money (for me, anyway) on magazine ads to ramp up the business, but right before I did, a company overseas started advertising very similar units at about half the price I could make them. So that ended that. Better to find out early than late!

I use Macs to this very day, although I started switching over primarily to the dark side [*grin*] back in 1996 when Newtek came out with the first version of Lightwave 3D for the PC.

Eventually it got too expensive to keep software updated for both Mac and PC, and I gradually migrated all my production apps to the PC. I still love my Macs, though. I’m platform agnostic. Use the tool you’re most comfortable using and be happy.