My First Mac

Work and Play on the Mac

Sarah Beck - 2001.08.07

When I was ten, in 1987, my parents sent me to a dangerously egalitarian Montessori school where I met the favored machine of that milieu. We had no Macs in the classroom - they were still too expensive then - but I chose my friends carefully.

My best girlfriend lived on eighty acres outside of town, and after we finished building a fort and/or destroying her father's tools, we would walk over to her Aunt Nancy's and ask to "play on the Macintosh." It must have been a 512k.

The object of my desire - an older man of twelve, who also owned a Commodore purchased with $300 of his own money - wooed me with his father's 128k by making MacTalker say things I cannot repeat here.

The neighbors owned a Mac II but had no color games. (Too bourgeois?) The sons of the family and I divided our time between Colony and the wheel on the Color CDEV.

When my mother bought a Plus, the kid down the street, who today works for Apple, saw MacDraw for the first time. He drew a .38 Special in 3D. One might note that we were in Texas.

My first real summer job, when I was fifteen, involved a computer lab full of another stripe of computer. When I finished, I bought a Classic with the $300 I was paid

Now that I'm a graduate student, I don't have three hundred dollars or a summer job, so I use a PowerBook 520 that I bought for $125.