A friend of mine in the corporate world had connections 25 years ago and would have been able to get a new Mac for me for the bargain price of $2,100. I thought about it even though I didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money to spend.

Some guys did succumb to technology fever and buy, “What the heck,” the reasoning went, “you can’t get these things. You’ll always be able to sell it again for a profit.”

Ouch! Common wisdom was as wrong about computer resales as Steve Jobs was in asserting that no one would ever need more than 128K of RAM.

At the time, my wife and I had a one-year-old, and a mortgage we couldn’t afford at $394 per month (including tax accruals). She was running a resume writing business out of our home on an Apple IIe. That primitive little machine with its green screen paid for itself again and again over the next couple years. It was far more practical with its hundreds of programs than the Mac. Yet we yearned for the Mac’s amazing graphics, the likes of which nobody had ever seen on a computer.

Until now, I never really thought about the fact that I had the good fortune to see some of the first Macs come into the business world. It’s hard to believe given the technology we have today, but they were breathtaking. People gathered around and simply stared.

Portable cell phones were kind of a big deal. Large format color printers made a splash. The first Blackberry was cool. Nothing, however, in the course of a single day, has had such an impact as the first Mac.

Happy Birthday to a classic, a true game changer.