My First Mac

Salvation Army Macs

Ian R. Campbell

Ian is a 17 year old high school student living in the Greater Tampa Bay area of Florida. He will be graduating in the class of 2000.

Here is the story of how I began using the Macintosh platform.

It was the spring of 1995, and I went to go thrift store shopping with my mother, or thrifting, and there was a Salvation Army that had just opened. They had a whole bunch of computer equipment come in. Since I had always used PC's, I knew little of Macs, though I was more into hardware at the time. They had a bunch of Mac Pluses, SEs, 512ks, a Classic, and even an old Lisa. Well, anyway, the Classic would not power up. As a result, he was ready to trash it, but since I was relatively curious about the Mac, I asked him if I could have it, even though it would not power up. He said I could have it, and since he was that nice to me, and I was worried if I needed parts, so I bought a Plus, an SE, and the Lisa (it was a conversation piece).

I got home, after spending $65 on Macintosh equipment, and showed everything to my father. He had even less experience with the Macintosh than I did, as at the time, I was in junior high school and took a typing class that utilized Mac Classic IIs.

We cracked the Mac Classic open, it had 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. However, the machine would not power up. Later that evening I jiggled the power plug with a power cord in the socket of the power supply, and managed to get it to start. Apparently, the power supply's socket for a power cord got pushed in and did not make contact with the analog board. After $100 more invested, I had a computer that was more effective and made me more efficient than my then in use 386.

Since then, I have owned 2 PowerBooks, a Power Mac 7200, a Quadra, and several members of the Mac II family. I have been using the "perpetual upgrade path" for the last 3 years, buying a used Mac, using for 6 months to a year, selling it, and then adding money to that selling price and starting the cycle over again. However, there are 2 Macs that I have owned and actually do miss, the aforementioned Mac Classic and a PowerBook 180 that was the first notebook computer I ever owned.