Found Footage: The Story of Macintosh

Was anyone else sitting here thinking, "why do you need to print the file out? Just e-mail it. Oh crap, e-mail wasn't invented yet." My first mac was a Mac Classic purchased with all I could save up in in 1990.

Are these old Macs like the one in the video worth anything? I have one.

Our computer store got a shipment of 30 Macs, Imagewriters, and MacWrite, MacPaint and Multiplan bundles. All of them were presold before we took delivery. The Mac sold for $2495, Imagewriter 1 for $595, Multiplan $195. We did a demo day at the store showing some of these videos and doing our own little demo of MacWrite and MacPaint and copy and pasting from one application to the other. At the time, we sold Kaypros as well as PC's and I can remember how upset the IT guys were about the Mac and how easy it was to set up and use. They could see the writing on the wall and their control was going to crumble and slip away. Apples goal was to sell 100,000 Macs in the first 90 days. They did that pretty easily.

We had a great service tech named Jack. In those first few months, you couldn't even get an external diskette drive. Jack took one of the service drives, got the pin outs of the Mac and the drive from tech support and built a custom cable to go from the drive to the diskette port on the back of the Mac. He then mounted the drive in a card board box and cut a 3.5" slot in the front to finish it off. Having an external 400K floppy was awsome!

When I went to Cupertino for Service training we took a tour of the service and tech support buildings. The techs all had little cubicles with their Macs, phone and modem lines (World Wide Web wouldn't exist until 1991). All the cubicles had little plastic figurines and models adorning their Macs. The coolest thing I remember seeing was a prototype 128K Mac with a 5.25" Twiggy (LISA) floppy disk drive. I'd love to find a picture of that. It's a road, thankfully, not taken by Apple.

What a great memory! I was one of those people who sat and played with the 128 and had to have it. There had been a pull-out section in my Time magazine describing it; I kept that ad for years but think it's disappeared now--would love to have it back. The Mac was so completely different from PCs of the time--even the first computer with black lettering and a white background that I had seen, instead of yellowish (?) on black. I was so entranced that I sold a life insurance policy and all the stock I owned to buy it--about $3500 if I recall correctly. Many Macs later, I still love them.

I have a better computer than that, but you gotta hand it to Jobs... I wan't one, I wan't one now!

My first Apple product was a Mac Plus bought in 1986. I never owned a Lisa, but it was my gateway drug to two and half decades of Mac ownership. The Lisa was my first drink of the Apple Cool Aid and I have owned more Macs (and now iPods!) than I care to remember.

Watching this video on my brand new MacBook Pro impressed upon me how much has changed and how much hasn't really changed. My fully pimped out MBP cost around $3K--probably about what I paid for my first Mac Plus. Amazing to think that I need a processor that is 381.5 times faster (3.06GHz vs. 8MHz) with 7,999 more (8GB vs. 1 MB) more RAM and 624,999 times more disk space (500GB vs. 800KB) to essentially run the same suite of software that I ran in 1986!

Of course, we didn't have digital music, digital movies, digital photography, and the internet to soak up all those extra cycles and bits we have now.

That video unleashed a flood of Apple memories from the first multifinder, the first laserwriter, windows spanning multiple screens (in color!), and being absolutely blown away by QuickTime 1.0 at the Apple developer's conference.

I try to forget the "Performa Years"--good thing Next bought Apple!!

It's hard for those who weren't using computers back then to fully appreciate what a huge, game-changing moment the Mac represented. I can still vividly remember walking through the student union at the University of Texas were they had a Mac in a display case writing, "Hello" over and over. I was mesmerized, and I wasn't going to rest until I had one. Watching these YouTubes on my MacBook Pro made me miss that old Mac, MacPaint and MacWrite.

Mac Paint looks awfully similar to MS Paint.

Gotta love the 80s music...memories!

I have an entire set of these "lost Apple tapes" on 8 DVD for those who are interested. A screenshot of all of them is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/amcintosh/ebay/histset1-8.jpg

They are about 11 hours long, full screen and even have Apple Tablet dreams that I assure people haven't seen before. (see DVD 2)

Contact me at amcintosh @ mac.com if interested.