Apples, Apples, Apples

This month marks 25 years of having a personal computer in my home -- all Apples. I began using an Apple II-plus at the high school where I taught, even borrowing it over school breaks so the family could develop computer skills, and when I purchased our first computer for the family in March of 1984, it was an Apple IIe with its (then) whopping 128K of memory and large floppy disk drives.



It served our family well for seven years, until replaced by our first Mac, the Macintosh LC (which stood for "low cost" though I didn't feel its $2600 price tag inexpensive!)





Five years later we upgraded to a PowerMac 5300, an education model equivalent to the Performa 5300. You might notice it has openings for both the large 5 1/4" floppy disks and for the newer 3 1/2" floppies...



This computer allowed me to burst onto the the burgeoning Internet in January of 1996 and I began my own web site, Chuck's Backpacking Bonanza, which chronicled my various backpack trips and offered other backpackers information and photos of the dozens of wilderness areas I had backpacked. I received hundreds of emails each year from visitors, both asking specific questions about locales and offering me thanks for providing such a comprehensive site, and it was awarded a number of "best site" designations by others.

In 2000, I purchased my first laptop, the PowerBook G3, making it easy to use both at school and home...



A new desktop, the iMac SE 700, followed a few years later, with its futuristic look and see-into body...



My most powerful computer came 6 years ago -- a G5 Dual processor Power Macintosh with a 17" cinema display, and it has been my favorite computer, allowing me to delve more into photo manipulation and movie creation...



... and since retirement brought much traveling to my life, it was joined a few years later by a MacBook which allows wireless Internet connection during my many months of traveling across the country. Back in those days, few motels had Internet connections, so I had to seek out wireless locales such as libraries or parking lots of motels that provided wi-fi.



This week I received my newest and most powerful computer, the quad-core MacPro tower with 24" LCD cinema display...


...which I am diligently working at setting up with files and applications from my other computer. With 2 optical drives, 4 hard drives, and 4 speedy processors, I'll be able to expand on all the photo, movie, and DVD projects I enjoy so much, and continue the work on the web site and 7 blogs I contribute to.

The succession of upgraded computers over the decades have allowed me to improve and expand my web site over the years, and it has been a labor of love. In addition to backpacking information, I have added information on places I've biked and paddled -- over 3000 photos -- so I changed the name of the site to reflect the new content -- Bike, Hike, and Paddle. The site has been visited over 162,000 times in 13 years and is still going strong.