For graphic designers like Zoë Korstvedt, now a Los Angeles creative director, the evolving Mac, with each added feature, was ripe with ah-ha moments.
To tinker with a piece, play with the text, “to visualize on your computer was just insane,” she said. “My colleagues and I wonder how we did it [their jobs] before.”
No wonder, then, that when Korstvedt, 44, married her first husband in 1989, she used half of their wedding money to buy her first home computer: a Mac SE/30, for which she forked over extra bucks for an upgrade to a whopping 8 megabytes of RAM. Nothing compared to the 12 gigs she now has. “I was styling,” she said with a laugh.
Jeremy Mehrle, 30, of the St. Louis, Missouri, area is too young to know a world without Macs. This MacAddict began hoarding and tinkering with tossed-out computers, and then he discovered eBay. Today, the motion graphics designer’s 1,400 square-foot basement is a museum to Apple computers, all-white and in gallery-style with about 80 fully-functioning machines on display.
“Some people think it’s really cool. … Others say ‘It’s Jeremy’s thing, it’s a little weird, whatever,’” he said. “I think if I had stacks everywhere, and you couldn’t move in my house, people would be worried.”
What’s Mehrle’s hobby, however, became a career for Dan Foust, 38, of Bloomington, Illinois. “Danapplemacman,” as he’s known on eBay, makes a living out of buying, and when necessary resuscitating, these computers before hawking them online to customers/collectors in places as far-flung as Italy and Australia.
So what would people pay for an original Macintosh?
“A complete boxed system?,” he said. “I can’t put a price on that.”
Remember that Bender case mod that had the entire internet a-buzzing a few years back? Well, this Russian nerd totally one-ups it with an absolutely sick Wall-E case that’s just flat out beautiful.
