Happy silver birthday to the only computer I ever loved

[thatcrazycajun]

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.

Comments

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

You might enjoy this song about computer nostalgia, though it's not about the Macintosh. I consider it one of the best songs we've ever had on the FuMP Sideshow.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

http://www.thefump.com/side.php?id=241#

Crap, won't embed. Try that link.

Founder's Day

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

I worshipped the church of the two St. Stevens for years. I remember sitting at jbsegal's Mac in a NYU dorm until I fell asleep. But I couldn't afford my own. I got my first Mac, an SE, used in 1994 and never went back to St. William's church again.

It's stored on an upper shelf while its replacements have come and gone. And it still works! If I ever need a stand-alone word processor, I can just plug it in. The greatest pity is that it can't interact with the newer stuff. The old extended keyboard is still more comfortable than the one that came with my iMac.

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

Northern CA. ;-)

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Oops. Sorry. My bad. Corrected.