NET RESULTS:It's hard to believe the Mac has been shaping home computing for a quarter of a century
SOMEHOW WITHOUT my noticing time has swept past and, to my shock, I read this week that Apple’s Macintosh computer is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Launched in 1984 with a famous, outrageously expensive and now iconic advertisement that was produced by film director Ridley Scott (it ran during the Superbowl and you can easily find it on YouTube), the Mac has shaped home computing for 2½ decades – introducing technologies and applications that would become benchmarks for how to accomplish a given task.
The little Mac made computing easy and fun, and has heavily influenced computer design.
But they sure were expensive. Buyers paid a hefty premium over a PC “clone”, as home computers from any other company besides IBM were referred to.
It all seems very far away now, as does the notion that the Mac’s initial built-in computer memory of an astonishingly small 128 kilobytes – yes, just 128k of RAM – was adequate. A little while later, Apple started offering a Mac with quadruple the memory – known as the “Fat Mac” because of its “huge” 512k of RAM.
Even with Moore’s Law whipping computer development into a froth, I doubt many early Mac users could have believed that by Mac’s 25th birthday, 1 gigabyte of RAM on a “noughties” Mac would be considered modest.
A Mac user for most of the past 20 years, I still recall in pristine detail my introduction to my first Mac (in retrospect, most likely, a Fat Mac). I was hanging around with postgrads in the old Pearse Street computer science buildings at Trinity in the 1980s. We were all working on theses in our various disciplines.
Unusually for an arts postgraduate – and thanks to having a father in academia who had a succession of university-funded PCs a home – I’d been using computers for a while, as well as the internet (then in its pre-web, command line view only incarnation), and even e-mail.
I’d used a couple of different word processing programs and had been using WordStar for about a year. That had given me a good level of familiarity with the commands you needed to type in order to start a new paragraph, or, say, to put a book title in italics.
The computing guys beckoned me over to a desk. “You’ve got to try a Mac,” one said. I looked dubiously at the boxy thing with the built-in screen, and the strange object on a cord plugged in at the back. I’d never seen a mouse before, though I had heard about them. I shrugged. A computer was a computer.
“And you’ve got to use Word for your thesis.” Now that was definitely expecting too much, and I protested. “I like WordStar. And anyway I know a lot of the formatting commands by heart, so I can type pretty fast now,” I said.
The guys looked at each other and burst out laughing in that patronising way computer scientists have when they possess superior knowledge. “Formatting commands,” scoffed one. “Sit down.” He pressed an on switch on the Mac, a chord sounded, and the black and white screen lit up. He pushed a small floppy disk into a slot on the front and a smiling Mac image appeared. “Welcome to Macintosh,” the screen said.
He called up Word, a window opened (I had to be told the blank white box was called a window) and he started typing. I could hardly believe it – words that actually looked like a proper typeface appeared on the screen.
“Now watch.” He grabbed the mouse and rolled it and the cursor... moved! He clicked in the middle of some text and inserted a word. “There – you try.”
I rolled the chair over, and started typing. Amazing! Try the mouse, I was told. I can still remember how very strange it felt, and how I rolled it all the way across the desk and off the other side. No, I was told, you can lift the mouse and do little short strokes to move the cursor, you don’t need to have the mouse stay in contact with the desk! It took me a good while to get the hang of it, that mouse.
Today, toddlers are practically born with a mouse in one hand, and using the device is second nature. But they were very strange in the 1980s, if you’d never seen or used one before.
I was hooked, and I was lucky – because I knew that gang of computing postgrads, I had access to a Mac before TCD had Macs in its computer lab.
A couple of years later, my boyfriend of the time and I bought one. He worked for Oracle and thus got a 20 per cent discount, and it still cost us $2,000 – without a hard drive (it had a double disk drive, though). I wrote a Masters thesis, and then a PhD on it – my entire PhD thesis fit on one floppy, and the Mac operating system and Word both fit together on another floppy. I adored that computer, and it served me well, with never a glitch or problem.
I still have that Mac up in my attic – and it still runs. It is lovingly stored in a two-foot high padded bag with shoulder strap that made it “portable” at a time before laptops existed.
OK, now I officially feel ancient. Happy 25th, Mac.
klillington@irishtimes.com
Blog and podcast: www.techno-culture.com
