FACT: I'm a geek--or more specifically, a Mac geek. I've been a die hard Mac user my entire adult life. As a child, I had a Commodore 64 and a 128D, but ever since I've been exclusively using Macs both at home and in my professional life as a Graphic Designer. The very first Mac I ever touched was my Uncle's 1984 original Macintosh; the first I ever used professionally was a Mac IIcx at a newspaper job in 1991; the very first I owned myself was a IIsi in 1993. Along the way, I've used practically every Mac OS ever released--here's most of them.

Over the years, as I moved from once house to another, I lost a few OSes. At one time, I had the Mac OS X Public Beta (pre-10.0) but sadly tossed it when it expired and stopped working. I also tossed the old floppy disk installers to 7.5.5 and 6.0.8, which is kind of sad since that's the first Mac OS that I ever used. I'm currently using 10.6 "Snow Leopard" and will be upgrading to 10.7 "Lion" when it releases next month.

I've owned and/or worked on 48 different Macintosh computers (so far). Some were great, some were so-so, and some were garbage. The best were the SE/30, IIci, Quadra 700, 7500/100, G4 450 DP (the best computer I ever owned), Mac Pro 8-core 2.26, and my current primary computer, the iMac C2D 3.06. The worst were the IIvx, 6100/60, iBook G3/300 Blueberry, and the incredibly awful PowerBook 5300c/100, by far the worst computer I ever owned.

At one time in the early 2000s, I had approximately 30 Macs in my house, which was utter insanity. I even had a bookshelf built out of six Mac Classics. I've since gotten rid of almost all the old Macs; the only ones I still have are my current iMac, current MacBook Pro, PowerBook G4 Ti (which is about to be retired), my old beloved Quadra 700, and the original 1984 512k (pictured above) which I will never, ever get rid of. It's a true classic and a bona fide historical artifact.

I have been a Mac user my entire adult life (I've never even owned or had to use a Windows-based PC), even through the "bad years" in the late 90s when it looked like Apple was going to die...right before Steve Jobs came back and saved Apple. Thank God he did; I honestly can't imagine ever using anything but a Macintosh.

- dsicle

P.S. - Are you a Mac user? When did you get your first Mac? Click the TWEET BUTTON below and let me know!

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