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My First Mac

My First iMac

- 2008.05.19

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When I saw the other My First Mac articles, I figured I'd share my story too.

My Macintosh experience begins in 2003. My school had two Bondi blue iMacs, and these things were always unplugged. I asked my teacher why these computers weren't in use.

He said, "Because no one knows how to use a Macintosh." I convinced him to plug one of them in, and I turned it on.

From that moment, I have been completely in love with the GUI of Mac OS. It was so easy to use and had tons of cool features.

A few years passed. In June 2007, I was lucky enough to find an iMac, just like the one I played with at school, in a dumpster. I saved the poor thing from certain death, and it became my first Mac.

That iMac made me realize how great Apple's products are - and how they are so easy to learn.

Imagine if 72-year-old Aunt Enid were to get her very first Dell (or Dull, as I prefer to call them). She would probably have big problems navigating Windows, and those error messages (explorer.exe has performed an illegal action and had to quit. Consult your User's Guide or the hardware manufacturer if the problem persists. Illegal exception at 0x2e5466x2,55 etc.) would probably make here really confused.

Let's give Aunt Enid a Mac instead. How nice that it "just works", eh?

Being a long time PC user (from way back when I was 2 or 3), I felt just like Aunt Enid.

Anyway, that iMac now sits right next to my eMac doing pretty much nothing. I hope to install Mac OS 9 later this week and get the ol' girl running.

Since I found that iMac, I have acquired a ton of other Macs, including my entire Vintage Mac Network, a Clamshell iBook, a Dual USB iBook, a TiBook, a faster iMac, and an eMac. I will never forget that first iMac. It introduced me to the beauty of Macintosh and saved me from the ugly things known as Dulls - and instead showed me a computer can be really cool.

Thank you, Apple, for all these great computers.

Go to the index of articles by Carl Nygren.

Share the story of your first Mac experience by emailing with "My First Mac" as your subject.

Recent My First Mac articles

Thanks for the IBM PC, Dad, 01.09. Dad, thanks for bringing home that first IBM PC way back in 1981.
Overclocking a Mac mini Got Me Hooked on Souping Up Macs, 09.04. Stories of hot rodding iBooks, G3 iMacs, and PCI Power Macs on the cheap.
Mac LC III Still a Most Useful Machine, 07.30. A love affair that will last as long as they make Macs began with a used LC III in 1997, and it's still being used today.
Hooked on Macs, new and old, 07.15. Starting with an old Quadra in 2000, Royal left behind Windows and began acquiring his own stable of Macs.
More in the My First Mac index.

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