Since then, I've become happy with Windows at work. Two years with Windows 95 reminded me how much I liked what Macs have always had over Microsoft operating systems - the lick of chrome around the edge, and the idea that we're not beholden to those stodgy old 1970s text-based computing paradigms. Windows 95 brought a rich array of software on competitive, flexible hardware at a great price. I needed a laptop, but Macs were way behind the curve: expensive, stodgy, confusing. I stuck with my Macs as the PC competition got better and better, trading up to a IIci for college and my first few jobs. But that thinned out in the great computing purge of the early '90s, leaving the Mac and PC platforms triumphant as a few outliers with their Atari STs and Amigas tried to hang onto the edges. The message from the Mac? Create with me.Īway and Back AgainWhen the Mac started out, remember there weren't just 'Mac people' and 'PC people.' I actually don't remember there being many PC people - there were PC companies, and Apple, Atari, and Commodore people. The message from those systems was: Program me. Most of the computers I'd seen before then bundled in a programming language, if anything. The very first Mac bundled MacWrite and MacPaint. The Mac was the way to go.ĭeep down, that's the soul of the Mac, and the Mac is best when it returns to creative work. We take all of that for granted now, but in the mid-80s, none of it could be assumed. You could go crazy with fonts, lay things out on pages, or paste in pictures - and you could see it all happening as you did it. I don't think of myself as a visual person, but creating on a Mac in those days was so different from writing on any other platform. I got on the Net, the proper Net, for the first time using a VT100 emulator on that Mac, and even found some games to play.ĭid the Mac drive me towards publishing? I remember when I was 13 I wanted to be a lawyer, but Macs want to create. Pretty quickly, the setup included a screeching-screaming Imagewriter printer, a Hayes-clone 2400 baud modem and a 20MB SCSI hard drive. So in '87 I wrote my grandparents a proposal, and I started high school with a brand-new Mac SE. Was the screen tiny? Sure, it was tiny, but hey, so was I. This was the next wave of computing, one where we'd cast off the 8.3 filenames of the past for resource forks full of images and windows, all packed in a tight little box that didn't flop all over the place like a traditional computer. Wringing pictures out of text on my Atari 800 was some serious alchemy I could change the system font, but that required burning incense and paying homage to the moon.Īs I learned more about the Mac, it seemed even more like the future. If you weren't a home computer user in 1984, you can't understand how amazing the Mac seemed at the time. I'd sit doodling on MacPaint while my mom went around and bought whatever it was moms bought at Macy's in 1984. The little 9-inch screen in the Mac's box etched its sketches at 72 ppi, sharp as a box of pins. At home, my 14-inch Commodore monitor rocked 320-by-192 resolution at best, for a pathetic 26 ppi. Yeah, sure, the interface was like almost nothing I'd ever seen before, but it was the pixel density that really killed me. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.

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