Happy Birthday, Mac
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| NYU's Mac classroom, 1987, waiting to be unpacked. |
I had seen the "1984" SuperBowl commercial, of course, and had laid hands on that boxy ecru first-generation mouse at Macy's in Herald Square, and I knew, from the very first, that the Macintosh was a game-changer. I had been programming since 1973, when our amazing, crazy high-school math teacher had convinced the school to put in two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8 somewhere off in the Big City. So I knew computers. Or I thought I did. Until I saw the Mac.
It was love at first sight, and it is hard to remember, now that graphical user interfaces are all around us, what an innovation the bitmapped screen was. How natural it felt to move files around by dragging and dropping. And to paint, with a mouse? Anyone who remembers paint programs from the Apple II (and I have a Polaroid somewhere that I will try to dig up and post to Flickr) was agape with wonder at MacPaint.
And now, it is 25 years later. Last week marked the anniversary of the introduction of the modern computer age. Like the Gutenberg printing press or the Sumerian invention of writing, this was one of the flex points of communication technology. Just as it took 50 years after the invention of printing for someone to come up with the idea of page numbers, it took about the same length of time to evolve a human interface into the power of computing. And from that interface came everything we know today about the Web.
In a very literal sense. The Web came directly out of hypertext research that was being done here in Rhode Island at Brown University, where one of the pioneers of the medium, Prof. George Landow, latched onto the Mac early and with the team at Brown built Intermedia, one of the first hypertext systems. Exclusively for the Mac. At the University of North Carolina, John Smith, Jay David Bolter, and Michael Joyce were doing the same thing with a desktop hypertext tool called Storyspace. For the Mac. And at Apple, Bill Atkinson, who had been one of the key programmers on MacPaint, unloaded HyperCard on the world in 1987. Which was, BTW, the year of the first hypertext conference, and the year I was privileged to be part of a very special group at New York University that started teaching freshman composition using that room full of computers from the top graphic. And we started teaching them how to do hypertext essays. In 1987. On Macintoshes.
It was this yeasty, bubbling environment of graphical goodness, that put the face on the World Wide Web. Which was developed on a NeXT machine, Steve Jobs' summer gig between stints as Apple CEO.
We live in an amazing time. Take a few minutes to look back. Check out MacWorld magazine's coverage of "25 Years of the Mac."
Comments
Portsmouth Citizen
Tue, 01/27/2009 - 5:54pm
Permalink
Why School and Town Government matters
John:
This luscious nostalgic post of yours on the Mac is sandwiched between two posts about our schools and the budget pressures they face. Below is a clarion call to try to keep monitors that have been proven to save lives. Above is a recounting of the facts driving a potential school closure.
But here, nestled between the two, is why all that matters. It is hidden away in this sentence of yours, "I had been programming since 1973, when our amazing, crazy high-school math teacher had convinced the school to put in two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8 somewhere off in the Big City."
One teacher. One student. Making a connection that made it possible for you to have a career, to own a house, to raise a family and to pay your taxes and be a productive member of society. All because of one teacher.
One teacher, and... the acquisition of two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8. In 1973 it's a good bet that no one on the Town Council ever even heard of a PDP-8 or what it meant to hook up to it. That little bit of technology acquisition cost real money.
What items of technology acquisition are on the table now? The Town Council seems to be saying that it believes its role is to arbitrarily cut the school budget. What technology are we going to not acquire because of an arbitrary school budget cut by the Town Council?
What teacher won't have access to it? What child will never be exposed to that technology? What career will never be sparked? All because the new majority on the Town Council thinks it was elected to implement a 3% cap like Council President McIntyre said the day he was sworn in.
This is the body, mind, heart and soul of the issue facing Portsmouth.
So, happy birthday, Macintosh. Look in some other community at some other kids for the future careers using the next big technology thing. Not here. We don't care about that. We can't afford the teletype hookup. We care more about our 3% cap.