Time Flies - The Mac at 40

The 40th anniversary of the Apple Mac is getting deserved attention, and it’s taking me back to the day when a brand new Mac landed (like a UFO) on my desk.

I was working in Media Relations for Salt River Project, the big quasi-public water and power utility in Arizona. It was not a particularly happy time—the company had gone through a big reorganization and our staff had been cut in half. Although I survived the cut, I immediately inherited the additional workload and lots of phone calls at odd hours with fewer of us available to share the 24-hour coverage.

Until that point, we had relied on an ancient system of dumb, green-screen terminals running IBM’s Advanced Text Management System, a very early word processing program. It allowed us to create and store plain documents (although we figured out a way to use its file storage scheme as a crude email system) but was barely a step above a typewriter.

My colleagues and I were squeaky wheels and our boss successfully argued to the higher ups that we needed a technology boost, funded in part by salary savings resulting from the staff cuts. So one day the IT folks showed up with brand new Macs. They were truly odd. And we were the only employees in the entire company that had them. We got an afternoon of instruction and were left on our own.

Soon we were getting visitors from elsewhere within the company. Engineers would borrow our Macs to run programs that they couldn’t run on their early model PCs. Other employees would bring in discs from their homes, where they had become early Mac adopters. They were printing reports and little charts to take back to their offices. IT security was non-existent, but so was hacking as we know it today. I learned to make Hypercard stacks, an early use of hyperlinks that could whisk me from one index card to another with a click.

Then We Got a Brick

At about the same time, our staff got our first Motorola cell phone. It was the classic two-pound brick that would give you 40 minutes of talk time at 50 cents per minute. We shared this tech marvel; during the day I would grab it on my way to meetings and emergencies, and at night it would go home with one of us so we could be “on call” for whatever happened in the middle of the night. (A 2 a.m. call from the Operations Center was never for anything good.)

After a year of lugging the brick from meetings to accidents and incidents, we all got our own Motorola flip phones. If the brick was revolutionary, the flip phone was magical. Airtime was still expensive but the cool factor was priceless.

Foundational Technology

Compared to the technology that we enjoy today, these devices were crude (and expensive). But they were foundational. They paved the way for the big screens and little screens that both enable and kill our productivity. They existed before the web was common, before the phone and computer merged into a single screen, and before cat videos became a cultural touchstone.

Happy birthday, Mac. I’m pulling up a flaming birthday candle GIF on my android in your honor.

?