Happy Birthday, Macintosh! · 24. Januar 2009, 14:44
Today is Macintosh’s 25th birthday. As I always enjoy other people’s gadget inventory I’ll celebrate the anniversary by looking back at all those Apple boxes that passed through my hands.
In short, they were:
Macintosh Plus
Macintosh SE
Centris 610
Powermac 8200
Powermac 8500
Powermac G4 (first generation)
Powermac G4 (last generation)
PowerBook G4
MacBook Pro
In my possession but not really in use were:
PowerBook Duo 230
PowerBook 145
Quadra 700
Set Top Box Prototype
It all started with a Macintosh Plus in 1987. The box had 8 MHz, 1 MB of RAM, an 800 KB disk drive (those brand new tiny Sony 3,5 inch floppy disks) and a 9 inch black and white screen with a high resolution of 512 by 342 pixels. In this basic configuration, the Mac cost 3000 DM. To make it usable, I added a second disk drive (600 DM) and an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer (1200 DM) and ended a bit short of 5000 DM. If you take into account that a brand new Volkswagen cost around 17000 DM at the time you’ll see that this was an insane amount of money.
My life long savings were exactly half of it…
Thankfully, my parents had offered to pay half of my first computer, as long as I chose one that was no gaming machine but something usefull. Bye-bye Amiga, hello Macintosh.
I still own this machine today. It lives at my parents’ place in a custom-built cardboard box behind my sister’s sofa. After I bought its successor, the Mac Plus was borrowed to quite a few people afterwards, all of whom were seduced by it and bought their own Mac shortly afterwards.
Around 1991 I bought a Macintosh SE which was pretty much the same machine as the Plus albeit with a new case by Frog Design and huuuuuge built-in hard drive with 40 MB. Thanks to the hard drive I could finally start to write my own software with the help of Bill Atkinson’s great HyperCard (which did not fit on those old floppy disks).
Did not sell the SE either, seduced a couple more people with it, and as far as I know it lives in yet another custom-built cardboard box at my friend Fert’s place.
I skipped quite a few generations of Macs (the whole Macintosh II series which finally was color-capable was way too expensive starting at 14.000 DM — which did not include a graphics card or a hard drive…) and two generations of processors and kept working with that slowly failing SE. Until the Centris 610 came along. The Centris series was a low-end high-end computer with a crippled CPU, but it was sexy as hell, fast, affordable and it had a color screen. Its 68040 CPU was finally fast enough to play Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis. :)
Shortly afterwards Apple shifted its entire computer line to a new cpu architecture: PowerPC. Those new Boxes, called PowerMacintosh, were up to 4 times as fast as the old boxes, but sadly I had to ship 2 generations before I was able to afford one. But eventually, I sold my trusty Centris. First Mac I had the heart to sell!
So I was able to buy the rather cheap Power Macintosh 8200. That thing was a lower end machine with crappy onboard graphics, but it came in an incredibly sexy mini tower box. (Which was the one and only reason I spent the extra money over the ugly PowerMac 7200. Seriously.) Some of you younger ones out there insist the case is ugly, but it is not. Or at least was not at the time.
I did not keep it for long, because I had the chance to buy the real thing: Power Macintosh 8500
The 8500 is probably one of the greatest Macs ever built and certainly in the “Top 2” of Macs I have owned so far. While the 8200 had a non-upgradable PowerPC 601 cpu, the 8500 was equipped with a PPC 604 cpu on a daughter card. This way it would have been possible to upgrade it with a faster cpu, eventually even G3 upgrades became available. I never made use of that possibility, but it sure was a nice thing to have.
Furthermore, the 8500 had decent audio and video inputs and outputs on-board, which were great to play with. While you could not record TV-quality video, it was still possible to record 320×240 videos without having to buy a separate digitizer. Great stuff!
And last not least, the 8500 supports classic Mac OS, early versions of Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server 1.0 (which is basically a re-skinned OPENSTEP 5.0), BeOS, Linux (yuck) and the infamous Copland and Rhapsody OS prototypes.
To be continued…
