I haven't had a lot of experience with 8 and have never used it on a Mac of my own, but the first time I saw it was the first time that I had go with one of the Beige G3 systems (one of which is now mine) that they had where my dad works - this must have been quite soon after they'd got them, and I seem to remember thinking that the Platinum interface and the new icons were pretty cool, as before that I'd only seen OS7 and it was quite a big change! It was probably the first time I'd seen LCD monitors too, so compared with the Macs (and other computers) I'd seen before, these ones just felt so, well, cutting-edge! Not that I knew much about computers then; we only got our first PC at home that year (which was nothing compared with those Macs, but then one of those G3/Studio Display setups would have cost about 4 times as much as that Win95 system cost!)
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)