Tuesday, January 28, 2014

30 Years of Mac

I have no big theories or thoughts here. Only a recollection:

In 1984, my parents bought a Mac. This was the very first model, Macintosh 128k--except we just called it a Mac back then because it was the only kind. We had no games to start with, only MacPaint and MacWrite, which were more than enough for me. I probably used MacWrite to write stories; and I used MacPaint to learn about cause and effect. That is, to this day, 30 years later, I remember some of the special, strange features.

For instance: there were a lot of silly patterns (instead of colors), so I learned to make unbroken lines so that I could fill in spaces with a silly pattern--and try to keep it from spilling out. For another example, MacPaint had a mirroring function, where you could make your cursor action mirrored by another across various axes. (For instance, you could set it to mirror horizontally--turning one mark into two--and vertically--turning those two into four. And then you could go to town making snowflake like patterns.)

It couldn't do much, but man, I loved that computer.

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