Happy Birthday Mac
Apple computer rolled out the Macintosh personal computer 25 years ago this weekend.
A year later in 1985 I was just starting college. I had been using an old portable typewriter to write term papers, what a hassle, but discovered computer word processing at the law firm I worked at during the day to pay the bills while I went to school at night.
One day they were getting rid of a stand-alone work station (they were slowly replacing them with PC clones). I took the behemoth home. It was big, clunky and heavy. The batteries in it were about the size of a small car battery. It used eight-inch floppies. Yes, eight inch!
You could save your work on the floppy, but if you lost power while writing, you’d lose all of your work. I learned to save and save often after having 23 pages disappear on me on more than one occasion.
After my student loan check came through, I had about $2,000 with which to buy a computer. At the time a Mac cost just about $2,000, and that did not include a printer or anything else.
I went to the Leading Edge” computer store where I found a PC clone with 512K of RAM and a 30K hard drive, pretty good size storage back then. They also had a 24-pin dot matrix printer, also a pretty good piece of hardware at the time and a screaming fast 24 baud modem. All together, computer, printer and modem came to about $1,700.
Maybe the Mac was a better computer. Certainly the Leading Edge machine was DOS based, only had a monochrome monitor. But, for the price I could (and did) buy a much more useful set up in the PC world than I could have afforded in the Apple.
I’ve been a PC guy ever since. I’ve had jobs where Apple computers were the dominate venue for graphic design and layout, but I’ve always used a PC. The times I’ve had to use Apple computers, I’ve always found them frustrating to use. Seems to me that you can’t do a lot of stuff on an Apple that you can on a PC.
It’s as if the designers of Apple computers decide what things you can do with their products, things they think they’re users want, and then they lock down all the back-end stuff so you can’t mess up their systems.
On PCs it seems like you have more control of how your computer actually works. I’m no computer expert, so that’s just my impression having used both types of machines over the years.
Right now, I have two Dell computers. The family machine is a Dell desktop that I bought refurbished from Dell in 2001. It runs Windows XP home edition and works as good today as it did when I took it out of the box eight years ago.
My main computer is a Dell Latitude notebook running XP professional. I got it in March of last year. I use it several hours a day and basically do all my writing, blogging, Internet surfing and music mixing on.
I also have an older Dell notebook, don’t remember the model. It was running Windows 2000, but I’ve given it to a friend to put XP on it. I still have a Compaq notebook I bought back in the mid 1990s. It came out of the box with the disastrous Windows ME. I dubbed it the “Crashomatic” because it would seize up four or five times a day, which was a major hassle because at the time it was my major computer, both for work and home.
I tried to have it upgraded to Windows 2000, but after the IT guys wiped the hard drive to load 2000, they discovered they couldn’t find the right drivers to make 2000 work on it. So we reverted to Windows 98SE. The machine still works, but I seldom even boot it up anymore. I’d like to find some use for it, but I’m not saavy enough to figure out how to network it with the rest of my computers.
Anyway, after all these years, I still prefer PCs to Apple products. As a matter of fact I was in the running for an editing job at a newsletter company that ran on Mac notebooks. While I really wanted the job, I’m glad in a way I didn’t get it. The thought of spending hours upon hours gazing at that tiny screen and using the Apple operating system made the job seem like too much of a hassle.
So I’ll stay a PC guy for now.
BTW, that first Leading Edge computer I bought 25 years ago? It still works.
Manly Blogs
At 87% I guess this blog is more manly than many others.
Jules Crittenden runs Instapundit and others through the analyzer and comes up with the following:
Let’s take this thing for a spin. I know this is probably wrong and hurtful, but …
Andrew Sullivan. 80 percent male.
Glenn Greenwald. 84 percent male.
Relatively manly guys, blogwise. OK. Be interesting to see what would happen if either of them were named Jules. Given Glenn’s constant self-adulatory preening and Sullivan’s distinctly unmanly waffling. Uh oh, don’t want to suggest those are feminine traits. Pumas might come after me.
OK, I’m bailing on that. Here’s a good one.
Iowahawk. Hard-drinking womanizing motorhead of myth and legend. Dozens of blurbs all over his site say so.
Wow. Only 83 percent. He’s less of a man than Glenn Greenwald, and he doesn’t even have a Brazilian boytoy. That I know of. The analyzer probably can’t read that 1950s bald-guy-with-the-pipe logo. I guess we can start unburdening ourselves of oppressive stereotypes.
Instapundit. Damn, he’s only 64 percent male. Academia must be more emasculating than I thought. At least the Instawife (whose photo indicates she is not only female, but hot) is 60 percent female.
Gatewaypundit … girly blogger at 54 percent. “Gender neutral,” but they suspect a man. Sheesh. Something’s wrong with this thing.
OK, we need to run a control. Blackfive. Manly, warmongerly.
Huh? We’re moving back up, but still only 74 percent male.
Mudville Gazette, all war all the time, picture maybe muddied a little becaue Mrs. Greyhawk sits in when Mr. Greyhawk is out making war, 79 percent male.
Yikes! Just ran Ace of Spades HQ through the analyzer and own of my favorite red-meat blogs comes up only 76% male. Whoa.
The Herd of Independent Minds
People on the left like to imagine themselves to be brave political dissenters who risk much to “speak truth to power.” They put me in mind of high school kids who lemming like follow the latest fad in order to express their “individuality.) I always get a kick out of young people who think they’re expressing an independent streak when they get a tattoo or piercing like all of their friends. The real rebel is the one who stays tattoo and hole free when the entire crowd is getting inked and pierced.
Here’s a post I saw referenced on Little Green Footballs about by a graphic designer who engaged in a artistic thought experiment about what constitutes true political dissent. He redesigned the USA.gov website to reflect an Obama administration and caught a lot of flak from this not-so-free-thinking colleagues.
The next three links cover his explanation of the project, the actual site design and then the reaction from the herd of independent minds that attacked him for breaking free of leftist orthodoxy.
The Design of (the wrong sort of) Dissent
Based on the unsolicited yet copious response to my design dissent effort last month, the clearest lesson I learned was that the vast majority of designers have no respect for political dissent; only for Leftist political dissent. Further, the vast majority of designers respect criticism only when we’re all criticizing the same thing in the same way. In other words, hypocrisy and jingoism are far more fundamental design values of our “community” than intellectual honesty or individual objective evaluation. Apparently, designers are required to either run with the pack or get run over by the pack.
I find it absurd that it is only when I present something that many disagree with that I’m admonished to leave politics out of the content I present here; as if anyone but me has any say in what I present on my site. I have no say in what other individuals present on their own sites, and rightly so. There seems to be no shortage of designers waxing poetical about Barack Obama or showing off and linking to other such examples (design-related or not) on their personal websites. And there’s nothing wrong with this; only with the instance of me offering up a dissenting example of design and ideas. Hypocrisy.
Pluralism and multiculturalism are wedges used by the left to create openings in historically Judeo-Christian institutions. However, once inside, the left works to oust political opponents and upon obtaining control becomes vastly more intolerant than the previous regime. The left tolerates no dissent, never has, never will.
William Ayers in “Praire Fire” notes the campaign to delegitmize the anti-war movement and groups like Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Richard Nixon. Both men are demons incarnate for the left. But it seems to me both Hoover and Nixon were realists who understood the nature of the battle and sought to crush those who would destroy democracy.
Ch-ch-changes… (Update)
Ok, I reloaded the files for this theme, made a few small changes, and for some reason the comment function is working. YEAH!!
So I won’t be switching themes after all.
Making some design changes to Knuckleheadidjitgaloot today. The old theme, which I really liked, wasn’t letting anyone post comments. So I’m switching to this one and making a few design tweaks today.
In the meantime enjoy some David Bowie: