My First Mac

Love at First Use

William J Rose - 2001.12.11

Boy, was I excited when I bought my first PC. In 1985, $1,200 bought a PC clone built by my friend Donny - 8 MHz, 512 kb of RAM, dual 360 KB floppies, and a 14" RGB monitor.

I was happy using it, until a fateful day in 1987 when I saw and used a Macintosh SE. I was in graduate school and had a part time job in the engineering department. I actually used a fast IBM PC AT for my daily workings but was introduced to the SE for word processing by a coworker.

After using it for five minutes, I thought to myself, "this is how computing should be!" I had fallen in love with the Mac. I used it as much as I could and came to despise the PC I had at home. Not even the $250 spent on a 20 MB hard drive helped. I wanted a Mac. But being a starving graduate student, there was no way I could afford one.

After graduating, I had to leave the little SE. I pursued a Ph.D. and continued to use my PC until it was simply too underpowered to do what I needed. Still starving, there was no way I could get a hold of by beloved Mac, so I waited and used the i386 and i486 systems at school.

After graduating and getting a job, my thoughts turned to obtaining my dream. In 1994 I bought a discontinued Quadra 660av. I was in heaven! System 7.1 and all the shareware I could download via the GeoPort modem. Umax S900L I could download software, run Claris Works, and watch TV thanks to the Quadra's AV inputs - all at the same time and all on a 25 MHz machine.

I continued to use it until OS 8 came out and the 68040 was just too slow. I upgraded to a Umax S900, again more than half off in 1998. It ran everything I threw at it with blazing speed. Now it has been upgraded to a G4/350 running OS X.

But you know, I still pined for the little compact Mac SE I used more than a decade ago. So a month ago, when I saw an SE/30 at a yard sale for $7, I snapped it up. Now upgraded to System 7.5.5 with 32 MB of RAM and a 4 gig hard drive, I'm back in my glory days and loving it.

Telling my sister about how "cute" the SE/30 is, she remarked, "Only a nerd like you could think an computer was cute."

So I'm a nerd, but I'm a nerd with Macs....

Join us on Facebook!

Links for the Day

Mac of the Day: Mac IIfx, introduced 1990.03.19. This 'wicked fast' 40 MHz Mac trumped the 33 MHz DOS world.
Support Low End Mac

Recent Deals

Go to the My First Mac index.

Custom Search

Follow Low End Mac on Twitter
Join Low End Mac on Facebook

Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler 11 is now in the Mac App Store!! -- Special Introductory Price of $59.95!! -- To Buy From The Mac App Store Click Here Now!! Or buy direct from Strider Software.

Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker and Mac Casino applications in minutes.

Affiliates

Amazon.com
The Apple Store
The iTunes Store
PC Connection Express
GainSaver
Parallels Desktop for Mac
eBay

Advertise

Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2012 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc. unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPad iPhone, iMac, iPod, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.
Advice is presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
Email may be published at our discretion unless marked "not for publication"; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.