(CNN) -- Long before fish swam in Macquariums, hipsters got Apple logo tattoos and thousands camped out for days to get into computer store openings, there was a machine.



Danielle Brecker found this 1989 photo of friends on their Macs at Drexel University in Philadelphia.



Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of the original Macintosh, the first personal computer to draw masses, introduce the mouse and incorporate a graphical user interface, relying on images instead of text.



The Apple Inc. watershed product entered American consciousness amid fanfare, with a $1.5 million commercial, made by Ridley Scott, wowing audiences during Super Bowl XVIII. The piece's title, "1984," invoked author George Orwell's message and stood as a warning against conformity.



Two days after the ad ran, the Macintosh became available and life, as people knew it, changed. No longer were computers viewed as toys with which to play primitive games or as untouchable tools reserved for degreed engineers. We began to think different.



"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind "Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley," an online historical exhibit. "The gold standard now for personal electronics is, 'Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?' People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way."



Pang, 44, remembered being "mesmerized" by the computer when he first saw it up close in his college bookstore. He wasn't alone. Read about how iReporters are preserving Mac history



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."



The extremes to which people have gone in their love and loyalty for Apple (and specifically Macs) knows no bounds. Perhaps no one knows this better than Leander Kahney, news editor at Wired.com and author of Cult of Mac, as well as the more recently published Inside Steve's Brain. That would be Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
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