Happy 40th, Mac

You’ve been around for a decade longer than I’ve been alive, and yet I feel a kinship in age. Maybe it’s that decade you lost, wandering the lands of Performa and Quadra. Like good wine, you’ve only gotten better with age. We once feared for your longevity and you’ve certainly had your rough patches, but now it seems you are again in it for the long haul with your best days ahead of you. Though there are more options than ever with phones, tablets, and voice and spatial computers surrounding me to express creativity and get shit done, it is to you that I most readily turn. You are the tool — dare I say friend? — that best helps me to make the dreams in my head into reality.

To you, and all the people who have made you what you are over the last 40 years, thank you.

Here’s to 40 more.

By the way, Stephen Hackett has had the best roundup of of articles and other tidbits related to the Mac’s 40th anniversary today on 512 Pixels.

Update: Oh, and since we’re all doing it, my first Mac was the first Intel MacBook Pro — perhaps the greatest gift I’ve ever received — as a hand-me-down from my best friend Robert. Before I got that laptop, which we fondly referred to as “Lappy”, I had been running Windows XP, which I fully customized to resemble Mac OS X’s Aqua interface. However, it couldn’t compare to the real deal, and I’ve never looked back.