About a month ago, Lorelle VanFossen issued a blogging challenge to bloggers to describe their computer setup, from the past to the present. (I know, I’m a bit slow.) But, I thought, why not, I’ll go back and describe my family’s various computers from 1995 (when we got our first Mac) to today. A lot of the details in this post is thanks in part to Mactracker..

1995: Macintosh Performa 5200CD
This beige box was our first Mac and is really the computer that taught me how to use computers. I was just three years old, going on four, when this big beige box with a screen came into our house. (It replaced some older, non-Mac computer that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever.) According to Mactracker and some of my memory, the computer had a 75 MHz PowerPC 603 processor with a 16 KB L1 cache, a 1 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM tray-load drive and a floppy disk drive, 32 MB of RAM, and a 15″ display. The computer ran System 7.5.3. The thing was quite heavy–about 50 lbs., and had 1 ADB port, 2 Serial ports, and 1 SCSI port. It also had built-in speakers. It came with a big, beige keyboard (with the power button on the keyboard, not the computer), and a beige Apple one-button mouse. (It’s kind of hard to remember those one-button mice these days, eh?) I obviously didn’t do any of the stuff that I do now on the computer back then; most of my computer time was spent playing educational games and stuff. Heck, we didn’t even get internet access at home until 2002, so that was way in the future at this time.

2000: PowerMac G4
In June of 2000, my parents decided to get a new computer for themselves to use, while the Performa would be transferred into our room for us to use. They came home with a PowerMac G4 (referred to officially by Apple as the “PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics)”), which is still in use to this day, actually. It has a 400 MHz PowerPC G4 processor, a 64 KB L1/1 MB L2 cache, a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive, 128 MB RAM, and a 10 GB hard drive. Its peripherals include 2 USB 1.0 ports and 3 FireWire ports. It came with a graphite-color Apple Keyboard and Mouse that went along with the iMacs at the time (yes, that means the strangely-oval-shaped trackball mouse that was ridiculed so much). It came with Mac OS 9.0.4, which we upgraded to 9.1 about a year later. We’ve since upgraded the computer with 256 MB of RAM (done in 2005 so we could install Tiger), an additional 80 GB internal hard drive, and an AirPort Card. The keyboard was kept and is still in use, while the mouse was immediately replaced with a two-button optical mouse, and that mouse has also been replaced once or twice since as well. In addition to the G4, we also got a 17″ Apple CRT Display (the big one, but not the one that had the see-through case, that one would be released a month later). Actually, the purchase of the PowerMac G4 inaugurated our habit of getting new computers right before they’re replaced by Apple; one month later, a new PowerMac G4 came out with Gigabit Ethernet and faster processors, and the PowerMac G4 Cube was released. Boy, did that make us jealous.

2001: iMac G3
My parents may have brought in the G4 in June 2000 so that my brother and I could have the Performa to ourselves, but unfortunately, in December 2000, the Performa reached its peak and finally quit working properly, so we had to give it up. So, for all of 2001, we all went back to sharing the same computer, until Christmas came around, when a new computer entered the family. We got an iMac G3 (Indigo color), which had a 500 MHz PowerPC G3, a 20 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, 2 USB ports, and 2 FireWire ports, along with a 15″ CRT display. It, too, weighed in at quite a bit, about 35 lbs., but at least it came with a handy-dandy handle. It came pre-installed with both Mac OS 9.2 and Mac OS X 10.0.4 (and a CD upgrade to 10.1 was included in the box). We quickly got it setup under OS 9, but were a bit nervous about OS X, and waited a day or two before booting into OS X (kinda had a feeling like Pandora’s box). We later used the CDs to update the G4 up to OS 9.2 and Mac OS X. The iMac also became the first (and for a time, only) computer in our house to go online when we got dial-up internet in July 2002, which we later switched over to DSL in January 2004. (The G4 would also later get to go online, first via dial-up, when via the high-speed network when we found out that our original router was actually wireless and we got an AirPort card for the G4.) Unfortunately, less than two weeks after we got this new iMac, Apple introduced the new iMac G4 models. :/

2004: iBook G3 (the first one)
Around August 2004, I had a real urge to get myself a laptop, and my parents were finally willing to help out somewhat, so long as it wasn’t too expensive. So, in order to keep costs down, I went searching on eBay for awhile, and finally decided to set my sights on a clamshell iBook G3 (you know, the ones with the colors that looked like a toilet seat). The first one that I jumped on was a Blueberry iBook that had a 300 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 32 MB of RAM, a tray-loading CD-ROM drive, and a single USB port. But I didn’t quite read between the lines as well as I should have to see that it only had a 3.2 GB hard drive. Try as I might, there was no way that I could fit a copy of OS X Panther and all of my files on that thing, and so after working with it for about a month, I sold it back onto the eBay market.

2004: iBook G3 (the one I actually kept)
Knowing a bit more about the earlier iBook models, I went back onto eBay with a clearer idea of what I was looking for: the second model of the clamshell iBook, and I got what I was looking for. (It did take a month of haggling with a very uncooperative seller for me to actually get my merchandise, but I did finally actually get it.) Officially deemed by Apple as the “iBook (FireWire)” model, my new laptop had a 366 MHz PowerPC G3, a much-better 10 GB hard drive, a tray-loading CD-ROM drive, a USB port, a FireWire port, and 64 MB of RAM, which the eBay seller had upgraded to 192 MB, and a 12.1″ screen that had a maximum resolution of 800 x 600. I beefed it up with an AirPort card so that I could get on the internet, and later on, in 2005, I upgraded the RAM up to its maximum of 320 MB so that I could install Tiger (which wasn’t easy to do, but I did successfully get Tiger working pretty well on there). True, it may have been an older, slower kind of computer, but I kept on using it and loving it, even when newer computers made their way into the house.

2006: Mac mini
Our iMac gave up the ghost in May 2006, making it quite clear that it would no longer cooperate with us. (The fact that, in 2003, my brother had accidentally stuck a key in the slot-loading CD drive didn’t help life much.) My friend Robert Preston agreed to take the iMac off of our hands, and we got ourselves a new Mac mini to take its place. (We reused the keyboard and two-button mouse that we had been using with the iMac.) The Mac mini, still in use today, has a 1.5 GHz Intel Core Solo processor, a 60 GB hard drive, a Combo DVD/CD-RW drive, 512 MB of RAM, four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 400 port, built in 802.11b/g AirPort Extreme, built in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, and an Apple Remote. Despite being the slowest computer that Apple made at the time, you can see that it was worlds faster than anything else we had in our house at that time. We also went on MacMall at that time and got a fairly-cheap but still good quality X2gen 17″ LCD display that has built-in speakers in order to give the mini a screen, and we found that the full cost of that was still a few hundred bucks less than the cost of a new iMac. Of course, as usual, just a few months after we got the new Mac mini, Apple bumped up the specs on the Mac minis so that the low-end model had a Core Duo processor instead of a Core Solo. *shrug*

2007: MacBook
My iBook continued to loyally serve me for almost two and a half years, until April 2007, when the power management unit finally broke down and my iBook was no longer able to hold a charge. The cost of fixing it would far outweigh the point of keeping it, and so it was time to let it go. (I was still able to sell it on eBay for a pretty good price, amazingly enough.) We went to the Apple Store and got me a brand new white MacBook (my parents paid half, I had an IOU to them for the other half), which I’m still using today, obviously. As the first, and so far, only dual-core/dual-processor Mac we’ve ever had, my MacBook has a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, an 80 GB hard drive, a slot-loading SuperDrive, 1 GB of RAM, a 13.3″ glossy display (max resolution 1280 x 800), a built-in iSight camera, Apple Remote, built-in 802.11a/b/g/n AirPort Extreme, built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, two USB 2.0 ports, and one FireWire 400 port. It’s also the first computer that we’ve actually put under AppleCare, given how many times I took it into the Genius Bar during its initial first-year warranty. However, it continues to be my primary computer (actually, my only real computer, I barely use either of the other two we have in the house), and I intend for it to keep working for me for quite a few years to come.

Tags: blogging challenge, computers, iBook, Lorelle VanFossen, Mac mini, MacBook, Macs, Performa, PowerMac G4, setup