Computers started out as a fascinating hobby for me and nothing more. My first PC was an Atari 800 that featured a whopping 48K of memory, a real keyboard, and pretty slick graphics (for the time) with a max res of 320 x 192. My parents bought it for me in 1980 along with a 5-1/4-inch disk drive for around $1200. I pretty much stuck with Atari for the next several years, graduating to an Atari 800XL (1982) and an Atari 1040ST (in 1986).

My loyalty to Atari ended in 1992 when I purchased a new scanner for my 1040ST which came with a free copy of Adobe Photoshop. The program didn't work on the Atari, only on a Mac, so I went out and bought a Macintosh Performa 600CD so I could use it.

Since that time, I have been a die-hard Mac user and have never looked back. I've upgraded a number of times over the years, including a Power Macintosh 8100, a PowerBook 2400, the PowerMac G3, an iBook G3... and finally landing with a Titanium PowerBook G4 1Ghz and the amazing G4 Cube (which is showing it's age, but is so damn cool that I cannot bring myself to part with it... it is undeniably the most beautiful computer yet made).

So Happy 20th Birthday to the Apple Macintosh, which revolutionized computers in 1984 and is still revolutionizing the computer world in 2004. I am profoundly grateful to have been using a Mac all these years (as opposed to the heinous Windows alternative) and look forward to my next 20 years as a Mac user.