rss...musical expression addresses itself to the entire body and its meaning concerns our entire being. - Ralph Kirkpatrick
2006, November 01
A Mac Anniversary
Today is the 15th anniversary of my first Mac, a Classic.
In October 1991, I was assigned an essay for a bird study class at the University of Washington in Seattle. My daughter, who had been to college recently and knew about current trends on campus, asked me how I was going to write it. I told her, the way I always have, pen and paper then type it out.
She said, No, no. Lets go down to the computer lab and I will show you how to use the Mac.
Now, I had used a few computers before, at work, without feeling anything about them. But the minute I touched that Mac keyboard, I knew I had to have one. So on November 1, 1991, I walked out of the computer store in Ballard (Seattle) with a printer and a new Mac Classic. It had a 40MB HD and 4MB of RAMM (the maximum).
I did the paper, then went on to bigger and better things. I bought a modem and was able to hook into the University network, took free classes in Pine, the Unix mail program developed at the UW. By January I was on Compuserve and by June I was a member of the Berkeley Mac Users Group. I was learning about shareware, operating systems, and a lot about Microsoft Word 4, probably the best version they made. This meant learning about fonts, style sheets, layouts.
I would wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning and start thinking about what I was working on and of course I had to get up and get going. Sleep went by the wayside for a long time.
Besides Word 4, I was learning Quicken, a small page layout program from Aldus (remember them?), Music Prose from Coda, FileMaker, the Mac operating system and odds and ends of shareware. All of this on a 40MB HD and 4MB of RAMM. It was amazing what that little computer could do.
I loved that little Mac, and how it changed my life. For the first time, I felt I was part of a community. Neither my family of origin or being married had ever given me that same sense of connection.
Here is a great little picture of the Classic with OS X running - sure, sure. Wouldn't that have been something?
