exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I noticed that today (24/01/24) is the 40th Anniversary of the Apple Macintosh another 68000 giant.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20 ... -computers

I have (too many) 680x0 and PPC Macs (one of each colour G3 iMac!) and I always did love MacOS.

My first ownership of a Mac was an emulator (ShapeShifter?) on my Amiga. Anyone else get their first Mac this way?

I first used Mac in Autumn 1995. There was a single PowerMac 6100 amongst a sea of Windows 95 PCs in the Manchester University computing cluster. You could guarantee no-one was ever using it. So it was my go-to workstation.

Any Apple Mac anecdotes?

I think my first exposure to a Mac was via a wealthy friend of the family in the late 80s, was probably a Mac SE of some description and seemed impossibly futuristic with its mouse, windows, really sharp display and sampled sounds (I had a spectrum +3 at the time). There was some Star Trek game with sampled voices that actually sounded good, and I had great fun with Shufflepuck Cafe. I don’t think I noticed the lack of colour.

The next time I used them properly was after starting IT work in the late 90s and by then Mac OS was a crashy slow mess on futuristic looking machines (I recall a design studio having a load of them and they had to leave them alone while doing stuff like burning CDs). A few years later OS X came out and a couple of years after that I switched over to it having got an old Mac out of curiosity, 20+ years later I am still using Mac as my home platform.

The first time I saw/used a Mac was in the University College London "Pi Magazine" office in late 1988, using Pagemaker 2 to do the layout which had previously been done with cut and paste. We still couldn't get photos in so place holder boxes were used.

The Mac Plus booted from floppy but was connected over PhoneNet to a "server" in the Union office, along with an Apple LaserWriter. We'd print out the pages, stick photos on using Spray Mount and send them off to a printer to have the magazine printed.

Early the next year I used an SE/30 based in Middlesex Hospital to migrate data onto 3.5" floppies for my project so I could move move them to/from my ST for course work.

At university in our design class we had a room full of G3/G4 towers, absolutely beautiful machines. We all loved using them especially because of the 'Exposé' feature on the desktop.