Happy Birthday, Mac!
Happy Birthday, Apple Mac!
Yes, this year 2014 the Apple Macintosh celebrates its 30th year!
Hello, Mac...just look at you, all grown up!
The Apple Macintosh, brainchild of Steve Jobs, celebrates 30 years of innovation, 30 years of design excellence, 30 years of thinking and being different - 30 years "insanely great". For a generation, designers, musicians, photographers, architects - and a whole host of other creative types - have cut their teeth and staked their careers on the results brought forth from the combined efforts of their inventive genius and the technical superiority that is Mac.
By way of personal testimony, I purchased a Mac 28 years ago and never looked back. At the time, I needed a computer that would transcribe music. I was writing musical charts by hand and knew there just had to be a better way. So I began researching the options available to me at the time. After a brief period of analysis, I quickly discovered that Apple's Macintosh proved to be the clear leader in musical transcription. So, I bought my first Mac, a 512K, aka the 'Fat Mac'. State of the art in 1986 consisted of 512K of RAM (hence the Mac 512K moniker), a 4K floppy drive, a 9 inch monochrome display (max resolution 512x342 pixels), a keyboard and a mouse. No hard disk drive, no USB, no Firewire, no nothin'. Printer? Too expensive...I didn't get a printer until 3+ months later, and it was an impact dot-matrix type; laser printers were in the $5K+ category...not for the faint of heart. (Pictured here, the Fat Mac with an external floppy drive)
Still, it was a Mac and it was glorious! I could enter and transcribe music, and it was BEE-YOO-T-FULL! Nothing else even came close. Over the years I upgraded and eventually ended up with an iMac 27 inch Core i7 16G RAM Desktop.
Along the way I used my Mac for all things digital - music, home studio recording, imaging and design, video creation, program development, database management, etc. - and the list goes on and on. Today I simply could not function without it. In addition to my iMac workhorse, I have 2 mobile devices that work hand-in-glove with it - my iPad and my iPhone. Connecting to my iMac from afar is easier than ever with my Post-PC devices...and it has all proven to be EXTREMELY productive and amazingly fulfilling. Life simply would not be the same without them.
So Happy Birthday Mac! I hope you live to a ripe old age.
Oh...and one more thing...
Thank you Steve Jobs.
