The first Macintosh came out in 1984 with a familiar formula: expensive, limited, but elegant and easy to use. From the start it was something of a cult classic. Apple was struggling financially, and spent most of the 90s on hair-brained ideas: the Newton, the Pippin, the QuickTake. All of them flopped while the Mac languished, half-forgotten. A cult-ish community formed around the Mac because it needed a community just to keep it alive.
That community was still going strong in 2007 when I got an iMac and dipped my toes into Twitter — which at that point was mostly just a fun community hub for all varieties of tech nerd. It has since gone downhill.