A Personal Computer History (4) : Macworld

In 1995 i graduated from university and began work in one of the first web design agencies, actually it was a traditional print design agency dipping its toes in the then new world of the web (Netscape 2.0 was still in beta, thats how prehistoric this was). Most of the people in the company used Macintoshes and naturally after a while i wanted to get one myself...

Macintosh SE, where it all started

My first Mac was a Macintosh SE i bought second hand from a Cash Converters. It worked fine though the floppy drive had an annoying flaw in that while it could read floppy discs it had formatted itself fine these discs were unreadable in any other Mac and the same with floppies from elsewhere. My first Mac was an island therefore, though i was able to use a Localtalk bridge and Ethernet to access the SE from an iMac later on...

Mac Plus

The iMac yes, my first proper and brand new Mac was a Bondi Blue iMac. This replaced the Tulip PC as my main computer and set my computing down a new design and not programming orientated path. I've still got the iMac (and indeed the SE) though i'm unsure if it works. The last time i was using it i was trying to use OpenBSD on it and configure X Windows.

Over the years i managed to accumulate a mountain of Macs... at one stage i had over 18. I've still got many of them now including a PowerMac 7200, Mac IIci, a Macintosh LCIII, a Workgroup Server 60, a Mac Plus and my pride and joy a Mac 512K (which was the second ever model). I use this as a stand for my digital clock.

Workgroup Server 60 atop a tower of LCs and Mac IIs

Nowadays i'm on my second Macbook though of course nowadays it is used with a plethora of other devices including a Chromebook Pixel and an iPhone SE. We've come a long way from Pong clones and Cheese Nibbler for sure.

Whats in the Mac box Part 2

We opened the Apple Macintosh box in Part 1 and found the manual for the original Mac and how to use this new fangled mouse thing. Once you had mastered double clicking and dragging what actually could you use this massively expensive cream box for?

Well the Mac had a graphical user interface so you could do some graphical things with it, like produce pie charts using Microsoft Chart (sold separately).

Spreadsheets perhaps, Visicalc helped turn the Apple II into a monster hit after all. Microsoft Excel (sold separately) was written for the Mac first then the PC. Of course for some heavy duty number crunching you might need to buy a special numeric keypad add-on (sold separately).

Going on-line was becoming popular in the mid-80s with the advent of BBSes and services like Compuserve. Your Mac could have an Apple Modem (sold separately) to get online at 300 baud or an eye-wateringly fast 1200 baud!

With these (not inexpensive add-ons) you would be flying with your new Macintosh. You would soon get "that look" like this chap. That look which says "I am in control of my Macintosh".

Delving deeper into the Mac box we find a second manual for MacPaint, now you can let your Mac strut its stuff and you can draw a geisha. Try doing that on a Trash 80!

Lifting the MacPaint manual we have reached the bottom of the box... but wait there is something else here. A Macintosh cassette? What is this?

Unfortunately the tape doesn't contain early 80s Apple games or even long lost Grateful Dead songs but instead contains an audio tour of how to use your Macintosh. Alas i no longer have a working tape player so i can't tell you what this actually sounds like...

Whats in the Mac box? Part 1

When i first moved into my house (some 15 years ago now) i had the urge to fill it with computer junk. I managed to get 2 house clearances worth of old computers including a lot of old Macs and other Apple stuff including a lovely IIc. Now quite a bit of this junk has been thrown out since though most of the Macs are still extant including a Mac 512K (the second ever model) which i have next to me on my desk as i type this now as a kind of glorified clock stand. Most of the Macs though, which include lovelies like a Workgroup Server 60 and a IIci, are in the loft and i was up there the other day when i found this box...

It doesn't look much, just a plastic box with Macintosh written on it and a hand drawn apple. So what was inside?

Why its the original Mac manual and the box for the power lead! "You're about to learn a new way to use a computer" the manual claims and indeed it was true as this computer had a graphical user interface and a mouse. Now these were not unique even in 1984, indeed there was the Apple Lisa already, but the Mac was the first "affordable" (it was still very expensive though) computer with these features we now consider commonplace or even a bit dated in the age of the touch screen.

Few people knew how to use a mouse and a WiMP interface (Windows Mouse Pointer) back in the early 1980s. People were used to typing stuff into the likes of CP/M to use their computers. Now they could just wave a mouse around and click on something instead...

Over 30 years on the basics are still largely the same. Everything is more advanced and faster of course but the fundamentals have not changed that much from the first Mac to the Macbook i use now which has the latest version of MacOS on it. Of course nowadays 180K would not be a lot of space to play with...

Next time: What can you do with this thing?