Twenty-six years ago today, the first Macintosh was released.  I wanted to take this occasion to post another of my favorite Apple ads from years past.  This is Apple’s famous 1984 ad which introduced the Mac.  This version was the one shown at Macworld 2004.  Note the iPod clipped to the woman’s waist.  Enjoy!

The first time I had ever seen a Macintosh computer was in the Summer of 1986.  Having first learned how to use a computer on a TI 99-4A, I was fascinated by the graphical user interface, and being able to place objects on the screen exactly where I wanted them.  In the 1980s, the Mac was a revolution not just because of its use of the graphical user interface, but more so because of the creativity that it unleashed.  Although I have always been obsessed with learning and knowing how things work, my first impulse when I first used a Mac was to create something.

I eagerly signed up for my high school’s journalism class when I found out that the school had purchased 2 Macs to use for the high school newspaper.  The first applications that I used on the Mac were MacWrite, MacPaint, and what was then called Aldus Pagemaker.  By today’s standards, these Macs were slow, but in 1987, they were powerhouses.  It didn’t bother me at all that I had to play an interesting game of swap the disks every time I wanted to save a “large” file.  Macs at that time were very limited on RAM, and therefore, they had to temporarily cache data onto floppy disks in order to save files that were larger than a few kilobytes.  If your Mac used one of the floppy disks to boot from, the only way for the Mac to save large files was so eject the system disk, and then ask for another disk that had more available space.  Later, when I was using a Mac SE with an attached external hard drive, the disk switching routine went away.

Did I mention the first Macs that I ever used had only small, 9 inch monochrome screens?  The Mac II was capable of 256 colors.  I had made some really kick ass graphics on the Mac SE, but they were lacking color.  On the Mac II, I could add color using Pixel Paint.  This was a bit like being blind before, and now, suddenly being able to see.  These Macs ran at a blazingly fast 16MHz, and they started out at only $5500!  Desktop publishing had been born on the Mac.  Adding color to applications like Pagemaker, and Pixel Paint unlocked even more possibilities.

I wasn’t a computer geek back in the 80s and 90s.  I didn’t actually become that until after I left the Navy, and bought the first Mac I had ever bought for myself.  That was a Performa 6360.  I had no idea what all of the different model numbers meant, but I had my choice of a Power Mac 4400, a Performa 6400, or the Performa 6360.  In the end, I just bought the one that was the cheapest.  The Performa 6360 came with a lot of really nice multimedia software.  This was back when Apple was touting the Mac as being a great family computer.

Nightmare before Christmas