512k

Inspired by my high school art teacher, who brought his computer to class one day, in 1986 I bought my first Macintosh computer, a Macintosh Plus. It would be the first of a dozen I would own over the next decade. Formerly a 512k, one of the original Macs that was upgraded to one megabyte (that’s right one megabyte) of RAM, giving it the ‘plus’ denotation. By contrast my current computer has 1,500 megabytes of RAM. The Macintosh Plus didn’t have a hard drive, but rather two floppy drives. I got a job a few months later selling them. And when the next model came out and I saw it on a Magazine cover, I decided at that moment that I would have one, and within weeks I had sold my Plus and bought a brand new SE30. They sold for $4350 at the time (working at the store entitled me to a significant discount) The thirty represented a new Motorola microprocessor and this computer had a 40 megabyte hard drive (about the size of a single .PSD file) It was a significant upgrade. I would begin using Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on this computer, manipulating black and white bitmap images on the 512 x 342 pixel screen.

My next computer was the Macintosh IIci, my first color computer. The IIci was a different form factor and had a separate display. This meant it could be easily upgraded. I upgraded the graphics card, expanding its ability to display colors, from 256, to millions of colors. Just the card, was over three hundred dollars. It was on this computer that I would create my first ‘ray traced’ image, using a 3D program. At my job, I had access to a scanner and laser printer which was a pretty big deal, as they were still thousands of dollars.

All the computers to follow were just faster versions, with greater storage, of these early machines.