(I wrote this inspired by the Dave Winer's post on his 25th anniversary of Mac site.)
I'm writing this on an early 2008 MacBook. Even though it is my seventh or eighth Mac, I don't think of it as just another computer. Macintosh has always been special to me, and I think is always will be. I know it is silly to get emotionally attached to a piece of electronics or a brand, but I will freely admit that I like it more than any of my other computers, which come and go and I rarely feel any need to write about them. The reasons are many, but I suspect one of them is the long time I had to wait before I could buy my first Macintosh. And it had to do as much with the lack of money as with the realities of 1984.
These were very bleak times in Poland. I used to spend 4-6 hours in queues to buy food, trying not to get lynched by the crowd furious that I was able to legally buy more food than others, because our family was larger than the average 2+1 (two parents, one child) family size promoted in Poland at that time and we had more food stamps. I remember dreaming of computers while standing in a queue in a big shop packed with people waiting for the delivery of meat, which would stay on the hooks for at most 30-60 minutes.
These were the last years of the Eastern European communist regimes, but the communists were still trying to control the spread of 'subversive' information.
I still don't know how, but a group of enterprising journalists in Warsaw managed to convince the board of an official Polish youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych to spare some of their paper stock to print a new computer magazine. It's difficult to imagine today, but the supply of paper stock for newspapers and magazines was wholly controlled by the state and the communist party. You could not buy it without a permit and you had to submit every issue to the state censors before it went to print. There were no private newspapers or magazines, and there were no private print presses.
I remember reading about the Macintosh in Horyzonty Techniki or Bajtek, the first computer magazines published in Poland. It wasn't easy to buy those mags, because they were selling so quickly that you had to be really lucky or on very good terms with the press kiosk salesperson to get a copy. The first issue of Bajtek sold in 200,000 copies in a country where maybe a couple of hundred people owned a Commodore C64, ZX Spectrum, or Atari 800XL. Buying a Macintosh was not possible for many reasons: there were no computer shops, you could buy a new Polonez car for the price of a new Macintosh, and with the economy being was it was, you could drive the car for 2-3 years and sell it at double the original price. But the main problem was political. Poland was blacklisted as a communist country, and neither Apple nor any official supplier would sell it to me, even if I had the money (I didn't).
I had to wait for eight years before I could buy my first Macintosh. There were a few 'small' things that had to happen before that. Solidarity had to be recognized as a legal movement in Poland, the communists had to face the facts and step back from power, the Iron Curtain had to collapse, the Soviet Union had to be disassembled, the Red Army had to pack their stuff and go home, my work and money had to finally have some value, and I had to be able to finally be allowed to hold a passport and freely travel abroad.
I finally got my first Macintosh in 1991 or 1992. It was Performa 200 (a Macintosh SE re-issue, if I believe correctly). I bought it in the UK and it has served my well for many years, before I had to sell it.
Happy Birthday, Mac!