Our first Apple products: How we joined the Cult of Mac

Apple started exactly fifty years ago, and most of the Cult of Mac staff have been Mac users almost since the beginning. We have 170+ years of experience!

Today’s milestone has us looking back on how we got started using Apple computers, from the original Macintosh to the first PowerBook to the early Mac mini.

Our first Apple products: How Cult of Mac writers joined the cult

We Cult of Mac writers are lifetime Apple users. And our expertise goes way back. We remember 9-inch monochrome screens, and know what SCSI stands for. We didn’t just read about Apple’s struggles in the 1990s in the history books — we lived them. We vividly remember where we were when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

We write about Apple because we love the products, and have for decades.

Table of contents: Our first Apple experiences

• Leander Kahney: The Macintosh
• Lewis Wallace: Macintosh SE/30
• Ed Hardy: PowerBook 140
• Graham Bower: Macintosh IIfx
• D. Griffin Jones: eMac
• Rajesh Pandey: Mac mini

Leander Kahney: An original compact Macintosh

I was introduced to Apple and the Mac by my dad, who was a huge Apple fan all the way back in 1984. He waxed rhapsodic about how Apple was revolutionizing computing with its amazing graphical user interface. He was giddy about it.

I was about 19 at the time, and my experience with computers was limited to various Commodore PETs and ZX Spectrums we had in our school computer lab. I absolutely hated them, and had no aptitude whatsoever for their command-line interfaces. We were taught how to write simple “Hello world” programs in BASIC (which we loaded onto tape drives), and I was completely and utterly underwhelmed.

But then my dad, a psychology professor at the Open University, got me and my brothers access to an early Mac in the psychology department. I don’t recall exactly, but it was likely a Macintosh 512K, and we spent hours playing with MacPaint in the evenings after the staff had gone home. We printed out our artwork on a large and noisy dot-matrix printer that shook the whole building as it spat out endless scrolls of tractor-feed paper. My dad proudly hung our (probably dreadful) artwork all over the building.

We soon got a Mac at home, too, and my dad was glued to it night and day, working on his papers and books. I used it for writing college papers, and I was always nervous that my work would get wiped as I swapped out the floppy that had Word on it for a floppy to save my essay. It frequently crashed mid-essay, too, and the sight of the classic “bomb” icon and the loss of my work filled me with indescribable rage — and bewilderment. This can’t be happening! I don’t believe it! How could this happen? We played a lot of Lode Runner, too.

My dad eventually got a Mac Plus, which I brought to America in a suitcase after he died. I used it for a while for freelance writing, and then stashed it in the basement for years. I scrapped it when it would no longer boot up. I wish I’d kept it now — in memory of my dad, who I still miss dearly. —Leander Kahney

Lewis Wallace: Desktop publishing on a Macintosh SE/30

My “Saul on the road to Damascus” moment for the Macintosh came when my college newspaper switched from a dreadful old system for filing copy to an all-Mac setup. The ancient newsroom system consisted of bulky terminals with tiny screens and 5.25-inch floppies that reporters would dash across the room when handing in a story to an editor.

As with so many things of that era, my recollection of the exact publishing system that we used prior to the Macs is hazy. However, I vividly recall writing a news story not once, not twice, but three times from my hastily scribbled notes, due to the system “eating” my copy. What’s not at all fuzzy is my memory of the revolution that took place when our college supervisors brought in the Macs. The screens looked bright and modern (little did we know then). And suddenly, the computers talked to each other (using a new-at-the-time AppleTalk network).

Yes, we still encountered the dreaded bomb icon occasionally due to system errors. But the Mac were light-years ahead of the previous publishing system. And QuarkXPress — early WYSIWYG desktop publishing software that competed with Aldus PageMaker — made it simple for The News Record’s copy editors to lay out pages on their giant, vertical(!) screens. The whole experience was so much more elegant than the old industrial garbage we had been using — and the MS-DOS PCs of the time, one of which I had in my dingy apartment — that I was spoiled for life by my first exposure to the Mac. I took my extravagant graduation gifts, a Macintosh SE/30 and an Apple LaserWriter, to my first full-time job at a local Cincinnati rag. —Lewis Wallace

Ed Hardy: One of Apple’s first PowerBooks

In the early 1990s, my university campus was all Macintosh — I could go to any computer lab and write on a Mac. But when Apple launched the PowerBook 100 series in 1991, I had to have one. I saved my money for months and was finally able to buy a used model.

As I remember it, this was the first laptop on campus. Other students were amazed… and envious. No company before Apple had been able to make a usable mobile computer.

It’s hard to describe now what a revolution that PowerBook 140 was. It was a computer that fit in my backpack with my textbooks, but had all the power of a desktop Macintosh. Rather than wasting time going to a computer lab, my Mac was always with me.

It helped get me through university, and lasted for years afterward. I eventually replaced it with another PowerBook because I was hooked on mobile computing. And on Apple. —Ed Hardy

Graham Bower: A Macintosh IIfx

The first Apple product I ever used was a Macintosh IIfx at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, back in 1991. The desktop-publishing revolution was just getting started. Most print artwork was still produced mechanically, and Macs were regarded with suspicion by many of my fellow students. As a result, the computer room was populated almost entirely by geeks like me. We really were “the crazy ones.”

Macs were expensive back then, and I couldn’t afford one of my own. But my college had a room full of them, and I couldn’t believe my luck. They ran System 6, with its one-bit, black-and-white interface. It was primitive by today’s standards. You had to manually allocate memory to applications. You needed extensions like Adobe Type Manager to do almost anything useful. And you couldn’t even move a font in the Finder.

But none of that mattered. The Mac enabled me to create designs that would have been impossible without it. And it looked cool, too. I was hooked. And I’ve been using Apple products ever since. —Graham Bower

D. Griffin Jones: An eMac in a school computer lab

My first computer was a PC my dad built for me in 2002, likely a Pentium II machine put together with spare parts, running Windows 2000. My whole family used PCs, so to my eyes, a computer was always a slow beige box with chunky gray windows, a Start menu, tiny bitmapped icons, pixelated text and Internet Explorer 4. 

You can imagine how my mind was utterly blown when I sat down in front of an eMac (or possibly an iMac) running Mac OS X. Translucency everywhere. Bright, bold colors. Pinstripes. And the icons! Microsoft Office, which I knew as clunky and boring, had these radical, shiny, extremely cool abstract letter icons, and I couldn’t take my eyes off. Even the mouse was inverted, black instead of white. My world was turned upside-down.

I wouldn’t get a Mac of my own for many more years, but the fire inside was lit. The 2006 Mac mini I inherited had a lowly 32-bit Intel Core Solo processor. It ran Snow Leopard at a snail’s pace. But it didn’t matter one bit; I had finally joined the Cult of Mac. —D. Griffin Jones

Rajesh Pandey: Just had to have a Mac mini

As a college kid with way too much free time, I spent weeks trying to get Hackintosh to work on my PC. Kexts, boot flags, kernel panics — I tried it all. Every time I thought I had it figured out, something else would break. Between that and the usual Windows headaches, I was done. So when I walked past a 2011 Mac mini at a store, I picked it up on a whim. No research, no spec comparisons. I just wanted the real Mac experience.

Within minutes of booting the mini, I understood what all the fuss was about. The experience was leagues ahead of everything I had tried before. I loved that little machine so much that I cracked it open, threw in extra RAM and an SSD, and kept it chugging for years. That Mac mini didn’t just make me swear off Windows. It made me join the Apple cult.

More than a decade later, the Mac mini is still my primary computing device, handling my ever-growing workload. It’s now even smaller, and yet it packs a much faster M4 Pro chip inside. —Rajesh Pandey

More on Apple’s 50th anniversary:

• 50 years of the most important Apple products
• The most important Apple announcement every year, from 1976 to 2026
• 5 times Apple turned failed products into huge successes
• The other geniuses: 16 unsung heroes from Apple’s first 50 years

Ed Hardy

Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh SE/30 (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer.

That’s because he’s a “tablet first” type of guy. Rather than use a Macbook, he connects a keyboard case to the iPad. And instead of a desktop Mac, he connects his tablet to a 27-inch display and full-size keyboard. (So don’t try to tell him that everyone has to use a Mac to be productive.)

Before coming to Cult of Mac, Ed wrote for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview and Brighthand, as well as other sites.