Blast from the Past: Original Macintosh manual

Funny that a writer on an Apple blog would confuse the original Mac with a Mac Classic. In my head a Mac Classic is fairly recent (it released at the same time as the LC and the IIsi if my memory doesn't fail me... solidly in the era of color Macs and 68020/68030 processors).

I'm old.

In the mid-1980s people carted their macs with them EVERYWHERE. I remember hauling mine on the bus to the university twice a month for years to attend MUG meetings . . . we all did. The ability to actually "take" a computer somewhere was part of the allure of the mac. Try putting a TRS-80 from Radioshack in your bike basket . . . what did they weigh, half a tonne?

Speaking of the Stanford quad...around the time the first Mac came out I assisted on a photo shoot in the Stanford Quad. The shoot featured Steve Jobs and then CEO John Sculley. Jobs arrived alone and before anyone else--certainly a first. Sculley arrived late enough that he was noticably concerned about having to make Jobs wait. Other than a court trial it's the first time I've seen a CEO sweat. It wasn't the last time I've seen the Jobs effect.

Huge manual, I am always surprised by what people keep around... I still have a few old DOS manuals myself.

-Aaron
http://aarondavidson.com

i don't know for sure either, but i'd say the "water table" effect is the vertical reflection effect, where the reflection under the image is a slightly dimmer mirror of the original. you can see it everywhere in apple products these days, from iWeb to coverflow. very subtle.

personally i think it's one of those steve jobs-isms that he brought back to the company and insisted on when he returned, so it's not surprising that he used it in the original mac manual.

That "Italian market" is the Stanford Quad, where it probably wouldn't have been all that unusual at the time to see someone biking around with a Mac in a bike basket.

I have a collection with Fat Macs (512k) and original 128ks. When I bought my first Mac, a Plus, the price included a 3 hour one-on-one training session with the Apple sales rep who even installed the computer for me. I still have a stack of old manuals - the one that impressed me was the original user manual for Hypercard!

My 512k Mac back in 1984 also came with a cartridge tape that led me through the first steps of using the computer, and there was also a Video tape or something (I can't remember) for exercises in "mousing around" to get used to the mouse. Opening and using my 512k Mac for the first time was a peak experience in my life.

Wow, they even had the 'reflection' effect back then...

Sorry, what's the "Water Table" effect?

I got my start on a lab full of Mac 512's in high school, so I remember the novelty at the time, but still, I had to laugh when I saw the chapter openings, where all these white males who look like they walked in from the Newport cigarette photo shoot next door, try to look sophisticated (and trying not to squint or hunch forward) while using a screen smaller than most ATMs have now. And the shot of the guy riding his bike through some Italian marketplace with the Mac in his front bike basket!?!?! The weight of it alone would probably cause him to do a face plant if he ran over so much as a small pebble!