I expect that pretty much everyone is writing a blog/tribute to Steve Jobs. I’ll leave that to people more eloquent than I and to those who knew him. His death, however, made me think back to 1984 and the first computer I ever purchased with my own money—a 128KB original Macintosh. I was a mainframe and minicomputer systems programmer by training but had moved to CP/M and other personal computers. I had used a Lisa at work and had spent a bit of time on a Xerox Star, so the Mac’s UI concepts were very familiar to me. There was something special, however, about having it at home to play with. It was amazing to be able to use a word processor (MacWrite) that actually showed the fonts on the screen rather than having to embed Scribe (or even worse, TeX) commands into a text file to specify font changes. It was almost magical drawing things in MacPaint. None of what I drew was art, but it was fun. Even my two-year-old daughter found it fun to draw on the Mac with a mouse. A two-year-old using a mouse is nothing special today, but it was then.
I programmed on that early Mac using a C cross-compiler. With other folks at Columbia University, I wrote a version of the Kermit file transfer protocol for the Mac. My officemate even wrote a great Scrabble game for it. The owner of Scrabble was not interested in licensing it for use on a computer. It was a different time.
Over the years, I upgraded my Mac to 512KB and added a 5MB hard drive. I played games like Dark Castle on it. But, as all computers do, it got old and slow. Eventually, I packed it up. I bought a succession of MS-DOS PCs, Windows PCs, Amigas, newer Macs, and all manner of devices. I turned my love of ever faster and better and smaller computing devices into a career. Evaluating and measuring their performance is something I still do today.
That first Mac, though, will always be special—will always bring back memories of when computing was magical. I still have it in my basement. The originally beige case is now a rather strange yellow. I think I need to go and see if it still turns on. I’d like to see that happy Mac face again…
Bill
