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Cel­eb­rat­ing 25 years of Mac ownership.

And yes, there is a cat sleep­ing on the mouse mat. The cat was named Bindi. The Mac is a 128K Macin­tosh, pur­chased Feb­ru­ary 1984. Notice the two 3.5” floppy disk boxes on the left hand side. The inside case was signed by the team that designed the Mac. I also owned every magazine of the time (Byte, Mac­World) that detailed the his­tory of the build­ing of the Mac.

One could say I was one of the ori­ginal Mac­fan­bois. From 1986 until 1998 I relied on Apple (dir­ectly, or indir­ectly) for my income. My major dream in life was to work for Apple itself. From 1995–8, I slaved away under vari­ous CEOs. Whilst the time at Apple was reward­ing, it was far from a dream.

The Macin­tosh user groups dis­trib­uted great free soft­ware; and not-so-legit tools such as Mac­Basic (the Apple Basic that never saw the light of day). User groups have not changed in the last 25 years.

This Macin­tosh spent 1985 with me at board­ing school; and paved the way for my first job in 1986.

Ulti­mately, it was upgrade to a Mac Plus over time, then an external hard disk. Now my par­ents have this Mac some­where in South Aus­tralia, with ori­ginal disks:

Liam booted this upgraded Mac and had a quick look at the applic­a­tions last week. Unsur­pris­ingly, this Mac still works.

The cat, sadly, passed away. I still own cats, and still own Macs.

Happy 25^th Macintosh.

Pre-Ordered. Best to keep my MacOS X up-to-date. Then it will match my Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate. Need to keep up with the Jones’ at Pod­Camp Perth.

My par­ents sent me the above photo. This was taken circa 1984.

The cat is a tabby/white ches­ted cat we called Bindy. Way before the Irwins used that name. And the Mac 128K’s name was Bonny. Yes, the boxes of disks to the right of the photo are geni­une Apple 3.5″ disks — each disk being worth about AU$7.00 at the time.

Cats, Com­puters — a com­bin­a­tion that lives through the ages.

In a very hon­est post, Say­ing Good­bye to Visual Basic, Erik Schwiebert from the MacBU goes into detail on the deep, tech­nical reas­ons why VB is going to be left out of the next Mac ver­sion of Office.

The nuances of the pain­ful decision, based on hard tech­nical sweat, are shown in depth — and illus­trate the quite com­mon pro­cesses soft­ware com­pan­ies have to go through when their plat­form mutates.

Maybe if the CLR goes MacOS, and the lan­guages like C# make it to Mac, and there is a com­mon Win Office/Mac Office object model — the world will be in a bet­ter place?

• 1984: Ori­ginal Macin­tosh 128K pur­chased by my Dad from the great Tim Kleemann (thanks, Dad and Tim!). Later upgraded to 512K with the expan­ded ROM. I still have the Sys­tem 1.0/Finder 1.0 disks around somewhere.
• 1986: Macin­tosh Plus: A massive 1Mb of RAM; I trans­por­ted an external 20Mb hard drive from work to home. Remeber pro­gram­ming in C to the MacOS Tool­box (always an adven­ture) on this beastie.
• 1991: Power­book 100 Prob­ably not my smartest pur­chase ever. Sighted it today in stor­age and its lar­ger and heav­ier than I remembered. There is a pic­ture of Liam using this laptop in a high chair when he was 6 months old.
• circa 1991–3: Macin­tosh IIcx: Loaner, not pur­chased. I first viewed and cre­ated Quick­times on this machine, and con­nec­ted to the “inter­net” via dialup/SLIP style con­nec­tions. I remem­ber an Apple sales per­son smug­gling one of these whilst in pre-release into a large cus­tomer in his bag; and pulling it out in a meet­ing. After lug­ging big old Macin­tosh II’s around, there was a shout of joy! You had to be there.
• 1995: Power Macin­tosh 6100: Added one of those DOS cards into the PDS, and run­ning it once or twice. Nice size, but not expand­able enough.
• 1995–8: All sorts of Power­books and Power Macs whilst at Apple. I abso­lutely loved the Power­Book Duos. As a fre­quent trav­el­ler, best sized and weighted laptops, and the 2300 (with PowerPC 603e pro­cessor) was nice-ish.
• 1998–1999: Power­Book G3. Sup­plied by Apple to Adobe, these were a lovely machine. A little heavy, but plenty power­ful to compensate.
• 24^th May 2006: Mac­Book Pro 2.13Ghz, 15 inch After many years in the Windows/Dell world — I’ve decided that its time to return to the MacOS X fold, and catch up with the alpha-web-geeks. Its birth­day present to myself. As its an Intel pro­cessor, its easy to run MacOS and Win­dows applic­a­tions. Just com­pleted install­a­tion of Win­dows XP (for work applic­a­tions) under Par­al­lels Work­sta­tion.

Hav­ing used all sorts of “vir­tual machine” applic­a­tions over the years; SoftPC, Vir­tual PC, the DOS PDS card; so far Par­al­lels is impress­ive. Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion is a nat­ive part of the Intel Core Duo, so com­pet­i­tion in this space over the next year will be inter­est­ing. Even Microsoft are talk­ing this up at Win­HEC this year.

If you are a Macin­tosh affi­cion­ado and have a yearn­ing to know where it all star­ted, Andy Hertzfeld’s Folk­lore site is a must-see.

A long, long time ago — in a dif­fer­ent time, I pos­sessed a Macin­tosh 128K. The people and his­tory here are like gods to me.