My First Mac

Hooked On Macs

Jay Patel

I am a young Mac user. The first time I saw a Quadra, when my uncle brought it home, I thought, "Wow." I had never seen a Mac or even heard of them. This was back in 1993. I was only 8 years old, and I loved it. I liked the plain simple System 7.1 and the games I could play (Prince of Persia, Factory, Quagmire, etc.). I played on it all day and really enjoyed using the software for my homework.

As time passed and technology grew, my lovely Quadra 650 began to feel slower and slower. I really tried to upgrade it, but it took time to load programmes. My hard drive kept on filling up. I rang up all the Apple companies in London, and they could not help. The lack of a CD-ROM drive made it even worse - and when I tried to get a CD-ROM drive, the Apple reseller said that they don't make them any more.

My parents wanted to buy a PC, and they did. In 1998 the Quadra was packed up and shut away. My parents started using a PCs. we had a Pentium-II 266 MHz with 64 MB of memory, a 6.4 GB hard drive, and many more features that the Quadra never had.

I fell for Windows high performance. But at the end of 1998, we found a company that would exchange our Quadra for a newer Mac. At last I was back on line with Macs again. We now had an 8200/120 MHz. I know it was not as fast as our PC, but at least it was faster than the 33 MHz Quadra!

When I switched it on, it really amazed me. The Mac OS had come a long ways since System 7.1. I had Mac OS 8.5, which really worked well, buy I could not get rid of Windows forever. In school we used Windows PCs, so I had to buy an emulator so that my PC and Mac could read my schoolwork.

When the 8200/120 began to seem slow, I upgraded the hard drive. I tried to buy a G3 upgrade card, but it was too expensive (£260 for a 266 MHz CPU). So in October 1999 I exchange the 8200/120 for a Mac Performa 5500/225 MHz. I paid £211.25 in exchange.

The Performa is so cool. I fell in love with the built in monitor and the way it saves space. It uses Mac OS 8.6 with 32 MB of RAM. It is fast, and I really aim now fully using Macs and sometimes Windows.

Well what can I say. I am 15, and some might say I don't have much experience with Macs, but they are wrong. I have used Macs and have read a lot of books on Macs. What can I say Steve Jobs - you have got me hooked.