Happy Birthday, Macintosh

Today marks the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. Ars Technica has a decent piece with various Ars editors reminiscing about their favorite Macs of all time. Reading the piece got me thinking about my own experiences with the Macintosh.

My history with the Mac goes back to 1988, when I was four years old. My father purchased a Mac Plus and, shortly thereafter, a LaserWriter Plus. I don’t think I can actually remember the day he bought the Mac, but I have a distinct memory of the UPS truck stopping at the top of our driveway, and the deliveryman emerging with the rather unwieldy brown box that housed the LaserWriter.

I don’t remember much about my first moments with the machine; my parents always tried to keep me away from screens at a young age. But I do know that I did manage to use it from time to time in my early years. I was probably six when I sat down with MacPaint and wanted to make a game. I wasn’t sure how, until I discovered I could draw shapes — what to my young eyes looked to be a helicopter — which I could then select with the lasso tool. With monochrome pixels progressing clockwise around my drawing like digital ants, I could click and drag my creation and make it fly. I was hooked.

The next seminal moment came shortly thereafter, in the early 90s, when I raced upstairs with my oldest sister on her birthday to find a small and unremarkable cardboard box with a 3.5″ floppy inside. She explained it was an online service called Prodigy, and that it allowed our Mac to connect to other computers around the world.

Flashforward to late ‘93 (or was it early ‘94?) and my father tells me that we’ll likely be getting a new family computer (the Plus had grown rather long in the tooth, though he did continue to use it as his personal machine until late in the 90s when its 9″ screen had a 3″ viewable range). I was ecstatic, and felt like the day would never come. Finally, after a lengthy afternoon at Micro Center, we came home with a shiny new Macintosh Performa, a 6115CD, to be precise. This was the beginning of Apple’s transition away from the 68k Macs to the PowerPC; it was also, despite ostensibly being a “family computer,” the first machine I felt I owned.

I have countless memories from this point on — of seeing Noah Wyle onstage as Jobs at MacWorld ‘99; of discovering HyperCard (oh, how I loved thee!) and sharing code with strangers on AOL message boards; of driving to Delaware with my mother to get the last blueberry iBook — it may have looked like a toilet seat but it had a handle and no latch! — from a CompUSA; of seeing New York for the first time with my dad, having an overpriced breakfast at 5am in midtown before getting in line for Jobs’s keynote; of befriending the employees of my local Mac shop, who made me custom-length cables and copies of System 7.

Of flying to Cupertino with my mom for the Apple shareholders meeting, attended by a man from Dublin and another who had come from Nevada by way of his Harley and another that complained that the free Apples provided at breakfast were not Macintosh apples; of meeting Fred Anderson and Avi Tevanian (who personally assured me that OS X would ship with a terminal application, despite the many rumors to the contrary) and Sal Soghoian; of seeing Woz speak my first semester of engineering school and getting to tell him that it was largely because of the Apple IIe that I was studying computer engineering; of starting my own private consulting firm to help people setup and troubleshoot their Macs and home networks.

Of analyzing every box on every page of every copy of MacMall, MacZone and MacConnection; of reading the monthly programming challenges in MacTech and wondering when I would be good enough to compete — or even understand what the problems were really about; of upgrading to System 7.6, to 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, and then to Mac OS X Public Beta, and then 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, and every single incremental version in between; of going to launch parties for 8.0 (with “I Break for 8″ bumper stickers), 8.5 (Sherlock!), 9.0 (better Sherlock!), and at least a couple releases of OS X.

Of coding late into the night until my mother would force me off the computer; of The Macintosh Toolbox and REALBasic and FutureBasic II and AppleScript and HyperTalk and GameMaker and demo versions of CodeWarrior and the first C code I ever saw; of watching every single keynote and webcast of Apple events for the past decade; of reading Crazy Apple Rumors and As the Apple Turns and all the other rumor sites; of the famous (?) “Back in Black” cover of MacAddict; of watching the community drama at the AppleInsider forums, and witnessing the bitter fork that gave way to AppleNova; of thinking that the iPod looked neat but expensive and that I’d likely never buy one; of reading rumors for years — years — of an Apple PDA, and finally — finally — watching the release of the iPhone; of standing in line for hours at the Fifth Avenue store to actually get mine.

Of being ridiculed for being a Mac user; of reading of Apple’s imminent demise and “beleaguered” status; of wanting to strangle Apple’s board of directors on a regular basis; of zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the Desktop File; of extensions conflicts and SCSI ID problems; of SimCity and Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle and Sam & Max and Marathon and Dust; of LAN games of Bolo and WarCraft II and StarCraft; of writing $5 checks to shareware developers; of becoming part of a rich culture with its own history and mythology and celebrities and traditions.

Of hearing that glorious startup chime, looking at the glowing screen, and seeing a small blue face staring back at me, smiling.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh. Thanks for all the memories.

posted by Nicholas ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged apple, history, macintosh, memories, technology

It’s a Wonderful Machine

I’ve been reading this story every Christmas for nearly a decade now. To properly enjoy it, you need to appreciate the historical context: When this was published in December of ‘97, Apple hadn’t released the iMac, let alone the iPod or iPhone. A year earlier at Macworld Boston, Jobs had been booed on stage when he introduced the new Apple/Microsoft partnership. The clones had been killed. Apple’s next-gen OS plans at least appeared to still be in constant flux and confusion. AAPL was trading at under $5 a share.

Now, sit back and enjoy, It’s a Wonderful Machine.

Merry Christmas!

posted by Nicholas ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged Christmas, apple, geek, nerd, tradition

iPhone first impressions

Yesterday afternoon I took off from work early to go stand in line for four hours to get my grubby little hands on an iPhone, a device I’ve been waiting for in one form or another for nearly eight years.

Because I can’t stand to stay away from it for too long, this post will be in the form of an off-the-top-of-my-head list of thoughts about this beautiful — beautiful — device:

Waiting in line and then purchasing two 8GB iPhones (one for me, one for my sister) at the Fifth Ave. Apple Store was perhaps the most pleasant and exciting buying experience of my life. I say experience because the entire thing felt like a spectacle: dozens of companies showed up to jump on the bandwagon and advertise their wares. I got a free fan, buttons, a keychain, slick info packets about everything from recycling your old phone to social networks trying to tie themselves to the iPhone, bottled water and lemonade.

While standing in line I watched a near pornographic campaign video for Giuliani be shot 15 feet in front of me. My guess is that if you google “Rudy girl” within the next couple weeks you’ll see what I’m talking about. Also, listen for man in the background yelling “vote Ron Paul.” That’s me.

I was interviewed three times. Once by a young woman doing competitive market research for LG (she’s going to call in a few weeks to see how I like my iPhone). Once by a Yahoo! Tech blogger (who said her press contacts put the number of iPhones at the Fifth Ave. store at 2,000). And once by a Fox News (barf) woman from the Geraldo show. They grabbed me right after I emerged from the store to the cheers and high-fives of dozens of Apple employees (they cheered everyone — not just me — but I suspect they may have sensed my enthusiasm).

Everyone in line was awesome. I lucked out and ended up next to a true Apple diehard and we reminisced about the days of the Apple II.

I was terrified walking home with two iPhones in tow and a beautiful Apple iPhone bag that screamed “mug me!” I stopped by the vendors at Columbus Circle and they were kind enough to give me some less inviting plastic bags to cover my loot up with.

I cannot explain how giddy I was and still am, though I imagine my roommates who saw my face when I walked in the door have a decent idea. My full experience was delayed a bit when the iTunes activation got stuck trying to talk to Apple’s servers (which I believe were trying to talk to AT&T’s, which according to the forums I read last night were hammered in the activation process.) I went to bed last night around 2:30 with a non-activated iPhone.

I naturally arose shortly after 6am this morning and immediately hopped out of bed and had my phone activated inside of a minute. Aside from the hiccups last night, it was a glorious activation process with no annoying salesperson in sight.

This phone is stunningly, achingly, painfully gorgeous. It is the single best designed piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned. This puts the all three Playstations, all iPods, Tivo, the Wii, the PSP, the DS and all the others to shame. Undoubtedly, the iPhone lives up to the hype.

The EDGE network is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Word is that the speed was bumped to 270 kbps in major metropolitan areas yesterday right before the launch. The wifi access I hawk from my neighbors is painfully slow sometimes, so right now my fastest net connection in my apartment is on my phone. Weird.

I browsed my favorite blogs, posted on a Facebook wall, checked Gmail. Everything just worked (though I was only able to view Google Docs — no dice with editing them).

There are a million little touches that make you smile. If you get an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video, clicking on it doesn’t open YouTube.com in Safari but instead starts streaming the video in the built-in YouTube player. Deleting e-mail messages is done through a “swipe” gesture that feels like “crossing out” the message. Visual Voicemail rocks. Text messages pop up while you’re on the phone in a delightfully friendly and helpful manner.

Battery life. I’ve been running this pretty hard (browsing the web, e-mail, long phone calls, listening to music, watching videos) for the last 4+ hours and it still shows over half the battery remaining.

My ringer is set to “Old Phone,” which sounds exactly as you would want it to. It’s a pleasant, tasteful, traditional phone ring.

The keyboard, which I was more than a little nervous about, is I think ultimately going to be a non-issue. The first five minutes were frustrating. The next ten were a little better. After an hour, it started to feel decent. My prediction? Within a week I won’t even think about it.

One revelation I hadn’t really thought about before — and which I still have yet to truly internalize — is that I now have Wikipedia in my pocket. Take a moment to think about that. I suspect this is one of those things that seems cool at first but can’t be fully understood until the ramifications begin to manifest themselves. And it’s not just Wikipedia, I’ve got the entire web — the REAL web, not some “junior” version — in my pocket. I have near-instant access to the largest store of human knowledge ever compiled.

posted by Nicholas ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged apple, design, iphone, random thinking