My First Mac

It Was a Pleasure

Joan Gordon - 2001.07.26

Back in the very early 90's my husband and I had a handcrafted leather shop on the Oregon Coast. I wanted to make a catalog of our soft leather handbag styles. Everything was out of sight for cost, of course, but some friends in Phoenix had a 512 Fat Mac (it had two floppies: one within, one in a separate box). They wanted to upgrade to a Classic to have a new thing called a hard drive; they'd sell it cheap.

"Can I do graphics on it?" I asked.

"Sure!"

"Is it easy to learn?"

"You'll get the hang of it in no time!"

So I brought the thing home, stuck in a disk (there was no hard drive), and started having the time of my life. I used MacWrite for the text and MacPaint for the pictures. I discovered I could do shading, simulate texture - all sorts of things! There was even music composition software! I dabbled in that, too. God, it was fun! Just the pure ease of getting it to do what I wanted was a pleasure unlike anything I had ever tried before.

Later, I wrote a novel and two screenplays on it. I made banner ads for sales. I updated the catalog every year. As dar as I know that Fat Mac is still running somewhere. Eventually, of course, I upgraded to a Performa, then a G3, now a G4. You know, I still miss that little smiling face when I stuck the disk in. I still can get pretty nostalgic when I think of the simplicity of the thing, the beauty of the design.

Long live the Mac!

Joan Gordon also does Web design: Webbuild Design and Easy Page On Line.