Editor’s Note: This month’s entry is by Garrick Anson. He blogs and tweets while not working or enjoying time with his wife and two sons.
The Christmas season of 1994 was a special time in my life. As with many kids, I had a bad habit of snooping around the house to try to get a glimpse of any unwrapped presents my parents had hidden. We had an old darkroom built-in our basement (my father had been a photographer for years) that had a lockable door to keep people from exposing any film or paper that might be out in the open. This room also served as a perfect place for my parents to lock up those unwrapped gifts each year. After pushing my conscience aside, I went looking for the key to the dark room in my father’s desk. One day after school, and before my parents got home from work, I went in.
Sitting on the small table in front of me was a shiny (OK, beige) new Apple Macintosh Performa 637CD.
Our first Apple Computer.
It was such a hard distinction from the grey, sharp cornered, bulky IBM and Tandy machines I was used to. The corners were lightly rounded, the colors of the beige case were slightly more pleasant, the mouse only had one button. It was amazing.
Not being able to leave well enough alone, I plugged it in and fired it up. I was grateful I hadn’t tried this while my family was upstairs because the System 7 start-up chime was deafening in that small darkroom, and I’m pretty sure you could have heard it from outside. The monitor lit up with the Happy Mac icon, something I had never seen before (all my previous Apple experience was with the Color Classic my school library had). There was no crude BIOS, no DOS command prompt, no MS-DOS Shell, just a graphical screen as it loaded extensions and then a desktop. So there it was, all 33mhz, 8MB of RAM, and a whopping 350MB of hard drive space running Mac OS 7.5.
I was hooked, and for the better part of a month I managed to sneak down quite a few more times to play around with the Mac I wasn’t even supposed to know about.
Of course, I was not as sneaky as I thought, and my parents found out what I had been doing. I watched as my parents packed up the computer and put it in the car to “return” it to the store. As you can guess the Performa still ended up under the Christmas tree (I think my dad was more excited about the purchase than I was), and I learned a valuable lesson about not getting caught…er…not snooping.
We were a house of early adopters, and had many things before other people knew that they wanted or needed them. We had various computers in the house for as long as I can remember. IBM, Tandy, Commodore, etc. We had internet access for years before that Mac (Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc…), and it still seems weird to think I was using the internet before there was a World Wide Web.
I spent countless hours playing games like Myst, Glider, Escape Velocity, and Doom on that Performa.
I messed around with a copy of Adobe Photoshop (version 3.0 if I remember right) that my dad brought home from work. I would edit photos and make custom icons for hours on end. I wasted more time than I care to imagine messing with ResEdit customizing the look and feel of the System various apps. I learned basic HTML and made a few small personal web pages, and even learned how to set up an Apache server. That computer gave me my love of both tinkering and technology.
Since then I have owned a couple old SE/30’s, a Luxo iMac G4, a Powermac G5, first generation Black Macbook, mid 2009 Macbook Pro, not to mention a slew of iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, and an iPad. I even just recently ordered a new Macbook Pro.
I’d love to tell you that because of that first Mac, I pursued a field in computers, design, photography, or communication. That would be a great way to end this tale, but in reality I sit daily in a cubicle farm, in a small windowless office, plugging away at Microsoft Word and PowerPoint on and outdated HP running Windows XP.
Macs have been my escape. I write, design, game, and communicate on them every chance I get. I’m grateful for my past experiences with them, and look forward to the future.
Want to write about an old Mac you love? Get in touch! In your initial email, please indicate which Mac model you are planning to write about, so I don’t have systems covered more than once.
After we talk, please submit your work in Markdown or HTML. I will be editing posts to conform to AP style, and will link to your site or Twitter account in the Editor’s Note at the top of the post.