This January marks 40 years since Steve Jobs unveiled what he believed to be the future of the personal computer. It was expensive and underpowered but the paradigm shift it introduced is unmistakeable. Instead of command line interface with directories you had pictures of folders that contained pictures of documents and all you had to do was move this mouse thing and click on them. Crazy.

Recently the Upgrade podcast had a few guests and they went through an informal ranking of various Macintosh models, including their first models, their favorite models and also models that were duds. If you are of a certain age, ahem, then a good bit of their conversation will resonate with you, it did with me.

For the record, the Apple Performa 6116CD was my first personal Macintosh that I owned. I was exposed to Macintosh computers in my last year at the Art Institute and I knew I would want one for myself. Thinking back on that computer, it was nothing really special in comparison to what was available at the time but it started me down a path that continues today of an Apple evangelical. I definately drank the kool-aid as they say.

I am currently writing this post on an Apple Mac Mini that contains an Apple M2 processor that roughly clocks at aproximately 3.49 GHz and contains 16 GB of RAM and storage on an incrediably fast 500 GB SSD internal drive. That Performa… had a PowerPC chip that clocked at 60 MHz, contained 8 MB of RAM and files stored on an internal 700 MB SCSI hard drive.

Happy Anniversary Macintosh and I look forward to see what your next 40 years have in store.

Performa 6116CD