- 2006.03.31
A brief missive on the 30th anniversary of Apple in which your
humble author attempts to set a world record for the ratio of
introductory lead in paragraphs to the amount of actual content in
the body of an article.
- There once were two guys named Steve
- One wore his heart on his sleeve
- His partner instead
- Tried using his head
- And made his partner believe.
Apple Computer turns 30 on April 1, and it's not without a small
bit of irony that Steve Jobs enjoys noting that both he and his
company have been told they only had days to live - and, as Mark
Twain is famously quoted as saying, reports of their demise had
been greatly exaggerated.
Despite the fun that we here at the
Lite Side have poking fun at His Steveness, lampooning His Self
and His Company (not withstanding the fun we have poking at the
Dark Side), it remains that Mr. Jobs has created a company that
generated technology that has changed the world, introduced the
computer as a human tool for human purposes rather than as an
inhuman machine for corporate purposes, and is in the process of
starting a revolution that will leave every known form of music
distribution an interesting footnote in the distant future. Whereas
we are mere pundits and lampooners, our words passing like
dandelion seeds in the breeze, as ephemeral as a stage play, hardly
worthy to breathe a few of the same air molecules (which,
statistically speaking, we probably have).
Looking back, we remember the cavernous expanse within an Apple
II computer; keeping boxes of Apple II software on a desk so
students could all run the same program; installing a Grappler
printer card and editing in the original version of
AppleWorks for the Apple II, where you had to type codes to invoke
such effects as bold and italic.
We at the Lite Side remember our first experience with a
Macintosh in a professor's office (T!), the wonder of being able to
draw and manipulate images on a screen, the utility of a mouse, the
mystery of the Chooser; the incessant disk-swapping from OS to
software, the streeep-streep-streeping of a dot matrix printer, the
first newsletter we ever did on a Mac, and the wonder that we ever
accomplished anything without it.
With a bit of nostalgia we look back on our very first online
flame war, our shock at the blatant imitation of Windows for the
Macintosh interface. We remember the Dark Times, when it seemed the
Performas and 5200s would spell the end of Apple As We
Knew It (AAWKI). We recall Mac the Knife's nearly unreadable prose,
the spin of As the Apple Turns (Jack, where are you?), and even
when MacAddict was sharp and wicked instead of merely snarky.
We've made a few of our own memories as well here at the Lite
Side, with Bumper Snickers,
Rumor Generators, iMacs the size
of igloos, and mice made from VW Beetles. We've dumped on the Dell Dude, showed Gateway the door, and watched HP
bounce around like a pogo stick rider in training. We've waxed
(ineloquently? uneloquent?) on Microsoft monopolies and twisted press releases to mean anything
but what they originally intended. But most of all, we've had fun
dissecting Apple's marketing strategies, hardware designs, and
especially code names for operating systems.
Throughout it all, there's a deep and underlying sense that
without the Mac, without Apple, and without the Two Stevenesses, we
wouldn't be here writing this interminably long introductory
section leading to the shortest body of an article in relation to
its introduction in the history of online punditry - or offline, as
far as that goes.
So, making the final transition from introduction to body, we
expunge our theses, cleaning them up with handy-wipes as we prepare
to send a message to Mr. Jobs, Mr. Wozniak, and everyone else at
Apple.
Our message today, Constant Reader, to the Steves for Apple and
the Mac - and to you for coming back again and again for more Lite
Side columns for no clear apparent reason - is simply and finally
this:
Thanks.
