This past Saturday, January 24, the Macintosh turned 25 years old. I thought I’d take a moment to reflect upon my own Mac journey.

I first met the Macintosh back in April of 1984. My pal Jerry, former Apple II owner and programmer, just bought a Macintosh and he wanted to throw a Mac party. A bunch of people attended, most of us just drank beer, but we got to play on the Macs. The experience was, well, different.

Being poor, I didn’t have the $2500 for a Macintosh at the time, but the publishing house I worked at eventually got one, so I had a chance to play.

Finally, in 1988, I got my first Mac: the Macintosh SE/80, which is a system viewed by some as the best incarnation of the original Mac “toaster” design. I beefed up my Mac with a full-page external monitor and an external hard drive. It was really my favorite computer, and I wrote a lot of PC articles on it. I even wrote some of DOS for Dummies on that Macintosh.

In 1991 I broke my Mac tradition. I bought a NextStation, the NeXT being Steve Job’s vision for computers and operating systems after the Apple board dumped him. At the time it was a good decision: the Macs of the early 1990s were less than inspiring.

I got a lot of mileage out of the NeXT. In fact, it still works: I keep it out in the garage in a place of prominence, and I still fire it up from time to time. It was also the most expensive PC I’ve ever bought: over $10,000.

In 1996, I bought another Mac, an Optima 600, primarily to write another Mac book that didn’t sell. After writing that book, I didn’t use that Optima much. The Mac was my graphics design workstation. While the PC could do graphics at the time, the programs weren’t as good as their versions on the Mac. So in 1999 I bought a Mac G4.

The Mac G4 was replaced with a Mac Pro G5 about 4 years ago, and I still use that computer. (I’m typing on it now.) I also have a MacBook Air, which replaced an older Mac laptop. Along the way I bought the kids some iMacs, the original model. I think we had Blueberry, Tangerine, and Grape iMacs in the house at one time.

So, yes, I’m a Mac person. I confess that I recommend buying Macs to all my friends (well, those whom I like). I highly recommend the MacBook as the ideal college laptop. If I didn’t have to write about Windows and the PC, I probably would not use the PC for anything other than a game computer. Sadly, 25 years later, the Mac just isn’t the game platform that the PC is, but that hasn’t kept me away for 20 years.