---
title: 'Ramblings On The Macintosh'
pubDate: '2/18/24'
tags: [Life, MacOS, Tech]
---

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. You've probably heard this a million times already this year, I'm pretty late to the party for writing a Macintosh retrospective, but I wanted to write this post anyway because of how important the Mac is to me. I might not be where I am today, especially not career-wise, if it weren't for the Macintosh.

That may seem like hyperbole, but it's really not. The Mac was the computer that ignighted my love of computers, not just using them but tinkering with them. The Mac showed me an entire world of near-infinite possibilities which I am still exploring to this day!

One of my earliest memories using a computer is playing Super Munchers on my grandparents' SE/30[^1]. I can't recall what originally caused me to become obsessed with this simple educational game, but I was hooked.

Some of my earliest memories of actually tinkering with computers though came from having to spend time with my mom after work at a local university. This is where I discovered the Internet and network share drives. I remember finding a seemingly limitless repository of software and games-in retrospect, probably pirated-on the university network and taking whatever I could fit on a handful of floppies home to run on our Macintosh at home.

I don't actually remember what model we had at home at the time, it looked like a Power Mac 7100 but did not have a CD-ROM drive–I distinctly remember going to pick up an external CD-ROM drive at CompUSA. My mom got it used, I can't recall where from but it was definitly not a new computer at the time. But I didn't care! I had games, both the 2 or 3 I had on CD-ROM, plus the many I had inadvertantly pirated.

I remember it had an earlier version of System 7 (what I consider to be the quintissential "Classic Mac OS") so it was missing some small features that were on the newer university computers. A couple of those features that come to mind are the Control Strip, and the more 3D-esque UI style, both introduced in later version of System 7. I discovered that these features were merely system extensions so I resolved to copy those extensions onto a floppy disk, copy them into the Extensions folder on our Mac at home, and cross my fingers. To my shock and awe, it worked, and that's where my love for tinkering with computers blossomed.

Not too long after, I discovered the application ResEdit, which could have been dangerous, but thankfully I was usually smart enough to make duplicates of anything before modifying them (guess I was born with good data hygene) and lucky enough to not trash any crucial system files.

Later, in middle school and high school, I started making real simple websites, set up a forum (remember those?!), and learned some rudimentary C, tried (and failed) to learn Objective C. In addition, the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X introduced me to tinkering via the command line.

Would I have followed the same, or similar, path if I'd only ever used Windows PCs? What about if the Macintosh never existed? We'll never know, but I can say for sure that I wouldn't adore computers in quite the same way. Maybe that's a "fanboi" thing to say, but I do truly believe it.

Oh, and, fun fact; I wrote this entire post in BBEdit 4 inside the Basilisk II emulator running Mac OS 7.6.

[^1]: I actually still have this exact computer, but it's long since bitten the dust.
