[LINK] "Mac and me — on celebrating the 31st birthday of the Apple 128K"

[rfmcdonald]

I quite liked Dave Bidini's National Post essay on the anniversary of the Apple 128K. My encounters with this computer were limited--I had a Commodore 64C at home, and only had early-series Apples at school--but I recognize the feelings.

Trundling out of the loading bay in the early morning, its trailers stuffed with square white boxes squeaking with Styrofoam, the trucks hacked and coughed their way along routes leading to commercial zones, none of them — not yet — boasting hulking retail monoliths or other white whales of consumerism. Instead, there were a variety of department stores, RadioShacks, gadget shops and Active Surpluses; maybe a stereo branch breach-birthed into the modern age. An employee with a blue shirt and striped tie blandly stoned and already dreaming of lunch looked at the watch his grandmother had bought him for graduation and, knowing it was time, entered the stockroom smoking a cigarette while walking to the grille at the back of the building, which he groaningly rolled up before waving in the haulage. The truck braked — an awful screaming sound that portended more than just ear ringing and the inevitable I-should-really-get-my-s–t-together employee soul-searching — and the trucker, a clipboard under his arm, climbed from his seat. He walked the length of the loading dock, disappeared into the trailer and started lifting. A transistor radio duct-taped to the wall — not yet infected by the invention of open-line programming — played “Owner of a Lonely Heart” for the third time that day as a sweep of wind moved through the bay, swooshing an old newspaper folio along the floor. Somewhere a phone rang; the chime of its bell finding the two men. The trucker passed the boxes to the employee: five, maybe six, maybe seven, stacked just outside the stockroom. “Better not take too many, eh?” said the trucker. The personal computer. Expensive. About two grand. Besides, who knows what use anyone is going to have for them?

Looking back, the first Macintosh Apple rig — the 128K, born as a consumer thing on Jan. 24, 1984 — didn’t exactly arrive wreathed in the pure beauty of light. Instead, like the spore that it was, its poetry lied in its blockish, unassuming café au grey; mundanely alien, as muted a portal as C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe or what happened when Abbot and Costello accidentally leaned on that sculpture on the bookshelf in that room where they weren’t supposed to be.

It had a small screenface and a mouth open to one side, which is the expression one makes when uncertain about whether to do what someone else has suggested. It looked like a small television for fear of looking too much like anything else. One sensed that its designers — Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Steve Jobs and others — had as much of an idea of the exoticism of its impact as those who tried selling it. Even that Ridley Scott commercial that trumpeted the personal computer during Super Bowl 18 seemed to fetch for a vision of the future like two hands reaching to find each other down a dark hallway. There was a woman in red shorts, a hammerthrow and a sea of drones in Potemkin grey drooling in their fold-up chairs. All of this at a time of Night Court and Hulk Hogan and Madonna. A few days later, Michael Jackson was burned on set while filming a Pepsi ad, and people worried about what life would be like if anything ever happened to the King of Pop, proving that, as a species, following the right story has never been our strong suit.