{"id":30117,"date":"2024-01-24T07:27:18","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/?p=30117"},"modified":"2024-01-30T22:07:51","modified_gmt":"2024-01-31T04:07:51","slug":"1984-forty-years-of-the-macintosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/2024\/01\/24\/1984-forty-years-of-the-macintosh\/","title":{"rendered":"1984: Forty years of the Macintosh!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-30133\" src=\"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/MacDAy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"395\" srcset=\"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/MacDAy.jpg 400w, https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/MacDAy-300x296.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I remember this day quite well, believe it or not. What I failed to recall would be which Super Bowl teams played (Washington v. the LA Raiders) and the events I&#8217;m writing about were really on the 22nd, we just chose to celebrate the anniversary today. Or maybe two days after people had the first Macintoshes in their hands. It doesn&#8217;t matter! The cool stuff I can bring up accurately:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I spent the weekend hanging out with my friend Kelly Houts (yes, a dude).<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The weather was gorgeous because Houston had rebounded long ago from the terrible deep freeze around Christmas.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">We threw eggs at the front door of some other kid&#8217;s apartment since he was a bully who pestered us at Clear Creek HS.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The highlight was going to see Genesis at the Summit! The latter was replaced by the Toyota Center for the Rockets and concerts. I think grifter Joel Osteen made it into his &#8220;church.&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Phil Collins then didn&#8217;t feel well enough so they put the show off to the next day.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">However, the main event everyone goes on and on about was the Apple commercial during the game. It was the famous cinematic <em>1984<\/em> scene directed by Ridley Scott promoting the new Macintosh. Aired only twice. Of course, once during the Super Bowl and sometime I have no idea about. In order to be eligible for an award, I think the Cleos, a broadcast ad must run at least two times. Now it&#8217;s shown way more often in parodies (<em>Futurama<\/em> readily comes to mind, Fortnite, Republicans claiming all Dems are Big Brother and the best one is a localized furniture store), documentaries and Jobs had is digitally modified to have the lady runner wearing an iPod.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I didn&#8217;t give it any thought. I was 15 and contrary to my nerd credentials\/status, I was not into computers, unless they were used for games or a glorified typewriter. When I did see the first Macs (what they&#8217;d be known as), I wasn&#8217;t impressed. They resembled toys more than actual computers. The little 9&#8243; (22-23 cm) display, frequent demonstrations using the bundled MacPaint over MacWrite and this weird thing called a mouse. I&#8217;ve bored you all many times before on how my opinion was changed about them in 1988 and really by then Apple found a way to really sell them as a solution in publishing. It was genius! For a mere $10,000 USD in &#8217;88 values (over $25K now), you could have a serious operation with a couple Macs and a LaserWriter II. The &#8216;difference&#8217; for the money would be the software (QuarkXpress or ick, PageMaker), a couple physical hard drives and licensing some decent fonts as your audience will quickly find your usage of Times and Helvetica <em>pedestrian<\/em>. It sounds like expensive. Trust me, it was a bargain. The gear preceding it was at least three times as much so many smaller operations were dependent on service bureaus or the side hustles of local newspapers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Today, we celebrated how far the Mac has come in the last 40 years; I know it has, when I go to places with free Wi-Fi, I see at least a third to half of the portables are Apple, not Dell or the other counter-intuitive Windows-based. Not sure why Jennifer&#8217;s family prefers to do computer-stuff the harder way. As part of the celebrations, many came dressed in their best Eighties attire. Given how many I work alongside weren&#8217;t even born yet, I knew most were going to the usual exaggerations Hollywood gives to tell dumb people, LOOK! IT&#8217;S THE EIGHTIES! Me, as the picture above shows, I went with what I would&#8217;ve dressed like then. The one item you can&#8217;t see are my shoes and here&#8217;s the weirdest part, not Chucks but Vans. Due to a couple loopholes in Strake Jesuit&#8217;s dress code, Vans were allowed so I had them until they became impossible to replace in North Dakota. I returned to Chucks for the rest of my life. The current Vans are from my Weird Al costume and they&#8217;re also my fat lazy guy shoes around the house. Even on days off from school, my wardrobe mostly had shirts with collars. Another remnant from parochial institutions. Although I was a pubbie 40 years ago, I had to outgrow the clothes I owned until I could receive new stuff and it didn&#8217;t happen\u2026I was thrown back into Catholic prison by the Fall. Mills and Z don&#8217;t know how good they have it too. Unique T-shirts weren&#8217;t very common then. I recall many were just a solid color. Concert shirts were still 3\/4 sleeve-esque softball style. If there was a design, more often it was practically an ad for beer, cigarettes, car parts or a short-lived fad\/joke: &#8220;Where&#8217;s the beef?&#8221; readily comes to mind.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I had to add a\u00a0<em>Traveller<\/em> book for the final touch. My idiot parents confiscated all my D&amp;D books, they remain stupid enough to believe the Satanic Panic. I got to keep all the Sci-Fi crap oddly. What better book to have in the photo than\u00a0<em>High Guard<\/em>! So there you go, a too accurate take on what I looked like 40 years ago today\u2026minus the beard, 120 pounds and all the black hair dye growing out. I was as I am now, a pantie dropper!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I remember this day quite well, believe it or not. What I failed to recall would be which Super Bowl teams played (Washington v. the LA Raiders) and the events I&#8217;m writing about were really on the 22nd, we just &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/2024\/01\/24\/1984-forty-years-of-the-macintosh\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,44],"tags":[699,144],"class_list":["post-30117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-applecomputertech","category-sci-tech","tag-anniversary","tag-eighties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30117"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30137,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30117\/revisions\/30137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}