Happy 20th B-Day Mac!

The Macintosh turns 20 years old this year. I got my first Mac Classic right before 9th grade started. I had heard about them and the father I babysat for had a Mac SE in his office that he sometimes let me play games on. I was intrigued by MacPaint and was obsessed with getting one.

I was so obsessed that I worked all summer bagging groceries at the now defunct Gallahue's grocery store in Melrose for $4 an hour to save up the money for the computer. I bought my Mac used for $1000 from a couple that I had met through a Boston Computer Society newsletter. I also was able to save up enough for a $300 dot matrix printer. If you are too young to remember what those were - be happy.

When I finally gave my notice at the grocery store - I did it with a bitmapped clip art of a paper clip holding a piece of paper. In jaggedy Monaco, I typed something out like: "Please accept my resignation from the position of bagger effective November 12th. Thank you for the experience of my first job and letting me work in the store."

I'll never forget the smell of Windex on a Sunday morning. This was in the era before scan stations at registers. Every Sunday when I bagged I had to spray down the battered metal check out belts. I learned to "build walls" in the bags with boxes of crackers and cartons of milk along the edges of the bag to make them more sturdy.

Sadly, the hard drive of my first Mac broke about a year and a half later and I did not own another one until 1999 when I bought a blueberry iMac. Luckily I was able to use the ones at my college newspaper and print shop.

Its intersting to think how the skills I learned on the Mac shaped which jobs I would get and consequently who I would meet post college. You could argue that if I hadn't saved up for that first Mac I would never have met my fiancee at the newspaper.