My life in Apple computers

Macintosh SE/30.  Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I have been a Mac user since I was old enough to understand what a computer was.  Around the time I was four, my father bought his first computer which I believe was a Macintosh SE/30 (the poor thing's still knocking around in my family's basement somewhere).  It was a big beige box, had a grey-scale screen, and I could play Lemmings and a pretty graphically interesting version of Chess on it.

In the mid to late 90s, the Mac Performa 5200 showed up.  It had a color screen, provided me with access to SimAnt and Warcraft II, and introduced my family to this crazy thing called the "Internet".

In the intervening decade or so, my parents and two brothers have cumulatively owned three more desktop macs, six mac laptops, numerous iPods that represent a pretty complete timeline of the product's history, and my mother's first generation iPad.  I am currently on my fourth iPod (Touch), my second laptop (a spiffy 15-inch MacBook Pro), and, as previously mentioned, an iPad 2.

So, all told, my family could probably furnish a half decent Apple museum.

Given my technological background, I find it serendipitous that I should end up in a career field that favors the macintosh platform so much.  Apple computers are, and have been for a long time it seems, the technological companion of choice for creatives of all types; graphic design and desktop publishing included.

These days, the self-projected Apple image is very young and hip; very much a plug in with my generation.  But, getting just slightly more to the point of my post today, I am intrigued by a particular, much less main stream population of mac users.  Back in the day when Apple first appeared, the Apple I was just a kit for hard core technology hobbyists.  From there and from the ever advancing succession of Apple computers, clubs were formed to provide support networks and forums for discussion among mac users.

The neat bit is that a lot of these old groups still exist--often with original members still intact.  Not terribly long after my family first moved to Rhode Island, my father found one such group and has been attending their monthly meetings with fair consistency since.

The group, known simply as the Aquidneck Island Macintosh User Group (or AIMUG) is one of those clubs that has existed since the dawn of Apple, and seems to consist mostly of my father's generation or older with an occasional tentative appearance by someone's child or grandchild.  I've attended with my father on at least one occasion and found the company to be fairly pleasant.  The group seems to largely fulfill its original purpose as a forum in which questions may be answered, and new applications for the technology can be explored.

It's a bit of a bummer that the group has not, for whatever reasons, managed to phase in the younger, and not at all sparse, generations of mac users.  I don't know whether it's a question of effective PR, the prospective cohabitation of widely diverse age groups, or simply that, for my generation, computers have become less the hobby and more the vehicle for our hobbies.

Trying to incorporate younger mac users would be, at the very least, an interesting social experiment.  Perhaps that's a project for the future.