I remember it well. It was January of 1990. My new husband was a
young organic nerdy guy from Palo Alto - his mom translated
engineer-speak at Apple into manuals, and his school was awash in
Apples. I was older and rougher, a flannel-shirted tomboy from rural
Oregon where schools were often awash, another depressed guitar player
and hick Kesey-wannabe writer with a massive old manual Royal
typewriter and a box of manuscripts.
The odd little beige box with the tiny black and white screen was
just another indication that my beloved was a Genuine Smart Guy, my
intellectual equal, and that was all I needed to know.
But one day in the grey slodgy throes of morning sickness and
boredom, I idly asked for a demonstration of something on "that little
computer".
"It's called an Apple Macintosh 512K," he said
proudly. "One slot holds a disk with a program, the other is where you
save your work."
The drives whirred and clicked. He explained how to drive the mouse,
click on the "icons". On to the real magic, he showed me a program
called simply "Word". Type a
sentence. Erase. Start over, change the order, substitute something
else . . . moving words around with a pointer instead of
whiteout and rewrites. Simple. Fun. Economical. Easy.
Omigod.
The next week the manual typewriter went to Goodwill. I loved the
chatter of the dot matrix printer spewing out grocery lists, short
stories, letters to the editor, original song lyrics. The word nerd was
in heaven. I learned to SuperPaint.
Every two years we got a new used Mac from relatives higher up the
financial food chain. I got sucked into many hours of BBS. My band was
one of the first in Eugene to have a website. The kids became
Mac-literate before they were potty-trained.
Now, a dozen used Macs later, I'm a budding multimedia artist
squeaking along with a Power
Mac 8500 and a Pismo laptop, both maxed out on
DIY upgrades. I'm looking to upgrade again, feeling the old
anticipation idea of another new-to-me Mac, undoubtedly acquired
through dealer links on Low End Mac (just like my last two
laptops).
But nothing will ever be as quite as big as the complete paradigm
shift that occurred on encountering my first personal computer ever,
the Mac 512K. It literally changed my life.
