I never saw a Mac at any of my friends houses except one guy in HS who was more of a casual friend. It was so much more capable than the pc’s of the day it blew my mind, and it was already 4-5 years old.
Honestly, the early 1980’s was such a great time to be growing up. Computers were just starting to become common, and there was so much choice in the early days. Apple ( II or Mac), C-64 and then later the Amiga, PC compatible, Atari 400, 800, etc.
Bulletin boards, disk drives, dial up modems.
I never saw a Mac growing up either. My intro to Macs were 1993, 8th grade, the nerd-G&T English class I was in had them. No idea how old or new they were. We did some of our work on them, but for the life of me I can't really remember how we used them or what we did with them. iirc--and I might not be--Windows was a thing by then, and we might have even had it, but I was still booting into DOS and loading Windows from there. And I'd already been dealing with DOS for a few years by then, so a visual interface was all new to me. I recall thinking the Mac interface was way more visual than what I was used to, but pretty cool. Now that I think about it, I think we did some kind of presentations with those things. Like book reports and stuff. Maybe something akin to a forerunner of PowerPoint. One of the kids figured out how to do animations and taught us to make our images move around, and I felt like Marty McFly and I'd just jumped into the future.
I was not what you'd call tech-savvy.....like, I wasn't doing stuff like utee talks about, but I still recall the same sense of wonder you guys talk about. I'm a little younger than utee, maybe you too, but even a few years after y'all, that same ethos was still permeating the kids who had access to computers. I remember my dad telling me that one day nearly everybody would have a computer. It was hard to believe him, and I certainly wouldn't have imagined laptops and tablets, and people doing work or hobbies sitting on their couch.
The summer after my 8th grade year I recall AT&T had a commercial that ran, advertising telecommunication. It featured a voice saying something like "Have you ever attended a meeting......from your vacation bungalow?" and it showed a guy in beach clothes on the deck of what was supposed to be a beach-front vacation property with the beach in the background, talking to severe-looking people in business attire on a screen. Then the voice said "You will." I remember thinking that was awesome, and I thought we were supposed to be able to do that right now. Of course, the internet, such as it was, was dial-up, and most everything I knew about was bulletin boards (I got in major trouble on those) and absolutely nobody was doing anything of the sort. After a while I thought AT&T had lied to me, was full of crap, and I basically forgot about the idea for years. I just noticed during the pandemic when Zoom became so popular, that we've had Skype and Facetime and stuff for years, and I never really noticed. The future came and I'd failed to really notice it.
