A birthday wish for the redheaded British filk lady

Happy belated birthday from across the pond to aunty_marion! Hope you had a delightful natal day, as I know it will have already passed in your neck of the woods (way, way east of the US Eastern time zone wherein I reside) by the time you see this. Please accept my apologies for the delay; it has been a busy day for me.

Happy silver birthday to the only computer I ever loved

With thanks to bigme in the macintosh community for reminding me: This date in 1984 was the release date for the very first of a long and complicated line of machines destined to revolutionize not only personal computing but also a whole bunch of other fields (including the ones I have spent almost all of that time working in, graphic design, printing and desktop publishing).

The very first Apple Macintosh, with a whopping 128K of onboard RAM, a then-advanced 3.5" floppy-diskette drive, a tiny 9" diagonal monochrome screen showing a strange-looking graphical interface and something called a "mouse" that most people had no clue about, went on sale 25 years ago today. It and its successors would become and remain the company's flagship product line (at least, until the advent of the iPod and iPhone). I was in the spring semester of my junior year at LSU in Baton Rouge then, and didn't get to try one out until much, much later...or own one of its follow-on models, the Mac Plus, until early 1990.

It started the desktop publishing revolution, did away almost entirely with printing based on paper mechanicals, wax and stat cameras and enabled anyone to become her or his own printer/typesetter. It launched a few hundred companies making software, peripherals and accessories for it (including a couple of upstarts named Adobe Systems Inc. and Quark Inc.) and enabled the firm started by Steve Jobs and Steve "Woz" Wozniak in a northern California garage barely eight years earlier to weather more than two decades of technological progress, financial ups and downs, revolving-door CEOs and repeated predictions by Those In the Know of its imminent and messy demise.

Say what you will about the company itself, its co-founder/prodigal CEO's legendary ego and its practices over the years—and you can say plenty, as even the most diehard Mac partisans will admit—or about the evils of proprietary system software and hardware. But a platform that has lasted this long (and is now actually gaining market share, at long last!) in an industry where six months is considered an eternity has to have something going for it besides cachet, a fanatical user base and a humongous ad budget. (Commodore, Radio Shack and Atari all had these things for their desktop computers. When was the last time you saw a C64 or TRS-80 used?)

I love the Mac still, with all its flaws and those of its makers. And I have never been able to say that about any other computer I have owned or used, nor any other piece of technology. Happy birthday, little guy, and congratulations to Steve and the folks in Cupertino.