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The Machine that Changed the World

I am a devoted Mac user, and I always have been. But now I can pinpoint the day that it all started.

My dad just found the invoice for our first Macintosh computer, a IIcx, which my mom bought on December 5, 1989. It had a 16mhz processor, a 40mb hard drive and probably 1mb of RAM. These are megahertz and megabytes. Not giga (or jiga). The machine was $4,669 and the tiny monitor was $999 before a generous academic discount. My digital watch has more computing power than that 20-pound beige box.

I remember the first thing I wrote using that computer: a short essay for freshman Craft of Composition class in high school. I can nearly recite it from memory. I knew this new computer would let me use different fonts, but it took me forever to figure out how. I didn't understand that you had to highlight the text first.

I took a slightly faster machine to college with me, and I was the envy of my geeky friends with my whopping 8mb of RAM. At some point I bought an empty SE/30 case to turn into a MacQuarium -- I felt that any good Mac addict should have one -- but all the hacksawing got tedious and I gave up.

When we moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1998, we schlepped our behemoth Power Mac 7100 along, plus a 50-pound monitor that took up half the back seat. We dragged that thing into every shoebox-sized hotel room we stayed in for four weeks. We needed its dialup connection to hunt for apartments. The iBook hadn't yet introduced the world to the concept of an affordable laptop.

We've gone through a couple more computers since then, and we even own (gasp!) a Windows laptop now. But that first Mac was where I spent late nights cobbling together a high school zine with my best friend (who now lives in Ireland but says she reads this site - hi Jen!), where I learned to love writing, where I became an expert in Quark XPress, and most significantly, where I dialed into Prodigy 54 times a day (at 4800bps) to check my email and bulletin boards.

My dad's discovery of that invoice, and the fact that I just sifted through 13 years of emails in the process of migrating to a new mail app, has me on a nostalgia bender. My little world has changed so much in seventeen, ten, even five years. Back in 1989 I felt totally plugged in, I thought my Mac was pretty great and really useful, and I couldn't have imagined how it could get better. But now? I don't think I have to explain how my brain is practically networked into this thing and all its sweet life-enhancing productivity features. Call me fangirl, but I am still in love. My email, photos, music, contacts, calendar, phone (which incidentally is not an iPhone), they're all seamlessly woven together in useful and practical and cool and instinctive ways. How much better will it be in another ten years? It makes me a bit giddy to think about it.

September 3, 2007 11:58 PM