May 12th 2003 was the day I got my first own Mac. Or rather when it was delivered, I bought it a few weeks earlier and spent a lot of the time inbetween reloading some very bare-bones tracking sites. The website I ran on PHP and Mysql eventually fell apart, but I made a very rudimentary export to HTML files and so could walk back and find the date.
(It would probably be easy to get it all back up and running - I know I have the database, I think I have all the PHP somewhere too, and it definitely does nothing so fancy that modern PHP can not handle it. Probably with a lot less code than I needed back then, too.)
Martin and I were wondering the other day whether we already followed Apple news and watched keynotes back then. We have proven that our memories of the order of events and the time between them are highly unreliable. I imagined that I went back and watched the introduction of the 12-inch Powerbook (which was that first Mac) after reading about it somewhere. But, I also imagined that a lot of time passed between the time I discovered the machine and actually buying it. But the machine was only even announced in January of 2003, so even if I learned about it right away, I can only have had a maximum of about four months to mull over my purchase decision. Clearly, I must have kept at least a little bit up to date. And then it of course just accelerated from there.
It still is accelerating, really, the whole Apple universe. Incredible times to live in!
… I should dig further back and see if I made any notes before clicking the buy button …
Oh yes, that Powerbook still works just fine by the way. For some strange reason, I think the battery even held a little bit of charge last time I tried it. Fantastic little thing, that.