Cutting edge

The weather is still incredibly rainy and bad and so it is back to indoor blipping.

I was recently cleaning out an old desk and ran into some items that took me back many years. Specifically, I ran into this old manual and cassette for an Apple Macintosh. You may think, "so what?" Well, these are items from my first real computer, a Macintosh 128k circa 1984. Yes, this is from the old days where 128K was a large amount of memory and you booted your machine off of floppy disks!

Those were the days before Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Apple pioneered the GUI driven interface and this was the first mass market computer with this technology. Their first advertisement for the Mac was ground breaking as well. The newness of the interface meant that there were few applications to take advantage of the new interface and so Apple developed a word processor, MacWrite, and a drawing program, MacPaint. I purchased both of these and the cassette you see is a guided tour of these applications on one side and of the Mac OS on the other. (Note that the copyright on the tape is 1984.)

It has hard to put into words how revolutionary the Mac was. I remember marveling at the ease of word processing and drawing. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. To put it in context, prior to the release everything was purely text-based. (Think of a command prompt in Windows.)

Apple also shipped their Imagewriter dot matrix printers which were the first printers I ever saw that could print graphics and multiple fonts and sizes. (All other printers took the text output from the computer and printed pure text.) Seeing these disks and viewing the screenshots on Wikipedia really brings back memories for me. I remember how excited, amazed and proud I was of my Mac

I bet you are wondering what happened to my 128K Mac. Well, I eventually upgraded it to a Mac Plus. The manual you see in this shot was part of the upgrade and came with an add-on external floppy drive. (The 128K Mac did not support this external floppy drive.) I used the Mac Plus for a number of years and then migrated to a PC. The driver for the move was the rise of powerful and cost effective Windows-based PC's and the abundance of games. (For whatever reason, there were never as many games for the Mac, and I cared about that at the time.) I have been a PC guy ever since.

I don't think that any computer will ever compare to my Macintosh. It was truly cutting edge and completely revolutionary in the day!