Saw this cool chart (thanks to Gizmodo) and thought it was pretty sweet. Took a little stroll down nerd lane on this one.....
The first Mac I used was an original 1984 Mac. I had used a couple of the earlier Apple II's in college but my first real experience with anything Apple was a Mac. My buddy Denley got an Apple IIc and we messed around with that a bit right before graduating. Then in 1986, right after we got married, Kristie and I bought our first Mac, a nifty Mac SE, dual floppy of course. When I went to work for Connecting Point, I had a Mac Plus as my computer...my boss Jill had a Lisa for a while and we even kicked around an Apple III...mostly for some text-based space game. It was with Connecting Point that I had access to "cheaper" accessories, so I upgraded my SE to a whopping 4 MB of RAM and added a 30MB Supermac hard drive.
We ended up selling the SE and upgrading to a brand spanking new and just released 1990 IIsi including the sweet Apple Color Monitor. It was about $1500 (and that was CPA's wholesale deal) and the LC would've been a better choice, but they weren't released yet and we needed a computer now! Over the years I upgraded my IIsi, added in another 16MB of RAM for a total 17! I also acquired an external dual 80mb Bernoulli box and about a dozen cartridges...I thought I was the king! My connections at IE were really paying off.
By then the girls were getting a little older and I was swayed over to the darkside, Windows. The promise of a ton of free games and cheaper hardware were too much...so we went Windows for quite a while and sold the IIsi in '95. I waited a few years and in late '98, the promise of the new Unix based Mac OS was too much and I bought a used 1998 Power Macintosh. Officially it was the All in One G3 and had the video input and editing options. The iMac had just been released and I obsessed over the features (only USB and no floppy?)...and in the end I went with the promise of video editing and that wasn't readily available on the iMac in '98.
In 2001 I sold that Mac having never upgraded to OSX and really thought I was done with owning a Mac for a while. I wanted the goodness of Mac OS X but my life and business was Windows so... Then Apple surprised me and came out with the Mini. I was interested. Then they came out with the Intel Mini...and I bought.
We have the Duo Core version with Superdrive...and we love it. The iLife suite is the bomb. The girls are pro's (literally) in iMovie and iDVD. I'm using Final Cut Express and love it. I've added another GB of RAM, and have 3 external Firewire drives totalling 1.2 TB of drive space. Mac OS X is a treat to use. We are currently planning the purchase of MacBooks for the girls, replacing our aging Dell laptop with either a MacBook or MB Pro. I'd really like to replace the Mini with a slick iMac or even better, an 8 proc Mac Pro....watch it sizzle through FCE renders. Plus I run Parallels and have Windows 2000 on the current Mini but truthfully, I use it less and less. About the only "gotta have Windows for" is PC Anywhere (for Kristie to work remotely), Citrix/Remote Desktop (for me to work remotely) and Netflix's Watch Now service only works on Windows...and the Dell is holding up good enough for these three uses.
The first Mac I used was an original 1984 Mac. I had used a couple of the earlier Apple II's in college but my first real experience with anything Apple was a Mac. My buddy Denley got an Apple IIc and we messed around with that a bit right before graduating. Then in 1986, right after we got married, Kristie and I bought our first Mac, a nifty Mac SE, dual floppy of course. When I went to work for Connecting Point, I had a Mac Plus as my computer...my boss Jill had a Lisa for a while and we even kicked around an Apple III...mostly for some text-based space game. It was with Connecting Point that I had access to "cheaper" accessories, so I upgraded my SE to a whopping 4 MB of RAM and added a 30MB Supermac hard drive.
We ended up selling the SE and upgrading to a brand spanking new and just released 1990 IIsi including the sweet Apple Color Monitor. It was about $1500 (and that was CPA's wholesale deal) and the LC would've been a better choice, but they weren't released yet and we needed a computer now! Over the years I upgraded my IIsi, added in another 16MB of RAM for a total 17! I also acquired an external dual 80mb Bernoulli box and about a dozen cartridges...I thought I was the king! My connections at IE were really paying off.
By then the girls were getting a little older and I was swayed over to the darkside, Windows. The promise of a ton of free games and cheaper hardware were too much...so we went Windows for quite a while and sold the IIsi in '95. I waited a few years and in late '98, the promise of the new Unix based Mac OS was too much and I bought a used 1998 Power Macintosh. Officially it was the All in One G3 and had the video input and editing options. The iMac had just been released and I obsessed over the features (only USB and no floppy?)...and in the end I went with the promise of video editing and that wasn't readily available on the iMac in '98.
In 2001 I sold that Mac having never upgraded to OSX and really thought I was done with owning a Mac for a while. I wanted the goodness of Mac OS X but my life and business was Windows so... Then Apple surprised me and came out with the Mini. I was interested. Then they came out with the Intel Mini...and I bought.
We have the Duo Core version with Superdrive...and we love it. The iLife suite is the bomb. The girls are pro's (literally) in iMovie and iDVD. I'm using Final Cut Express and love it. I've added another GB of RAM, and have 3 external Firewire drives totalling 1.2 TB of drive space. Mac OS X is a treat to use. We are currently planning the purchase of MacBooks for the girls, replacing our aging Dell laptop with either a MacBook or MB Pro. I'd really like to replace the Mini with a slick iMac or even better, an 8 proc Mac Pro....watch it sizzle through FCE renders. Plus I run Parallels and have Windows 2000 on the current Mini but truthfully, I use it less and less. About the only "gotta have Windows for" is PC Anywhere (for Kristie to work remotely), Citrix/Remote Desktop (for me to work remotely) and Netflix's Watch Now service only works on Windows...and the Dell is holding up good enough for these three uses.