Apple Mac- Unboxing & The Learning Curve

We unboxed the thing carefully. How I wish there was a video camera there (giant VHS cameras), it would be so fun to upload a You Tube unboxing of a 1984 Mac! The damn thing was small! It was a cubey thing, with a keyboard (we kinda knew what a keyboard was, like the familiar IBM Selectric without typing mechanisms), and a cord. Assembly was obvious. Two plugs. Turn it on. It worked. EFFIN AMAZING! Now all that we had to do was learn what a computer did...

We taught ourselves about software, not features of competing programs, but about what it was for, later. For now, everything we needed was on the machine. We also had to teach ourselves to type. No one typed in those days. There was a steno pool, and maybe a shared secretary for that. There was no need for a manager or director to type- ever. So we took turns sharing it, learning it. We created memos. Did I say it printed? Yes. We just plugged it into a printer and it printed. No drivers or other arcane nonsense. We later learned how amazing that was, when we tried to ply our newly acquired knowledge on a PC.

The native Works program and Paint kept us busy for a long time. We taught each other with informal groups, usually after hours like a new cult emerging within the tribe. It was magic. Learning how to format, add graphics, and make documents stand out made us more impactful than those who relied on dictation machines and the word processing pool to represent their thinking. Our documents had a life that continued after we left the conference room. People passed them around, and actually read them! We discovered leverage!

This was how portable computing looked then.

The Mac, Keyboard & Handy Carry Case

We took turns toting it home, and one adventurous guy even took it for a ride on an airplane! Sounds weird as I write it, but that was a trip we all watched to see how the Mac would fare. I told you, this was all new, and we were Ops guys, not propeller-heads. There were no IT departments yet. It was a time of bliss.

As our shared knowledge grew, we used this tool for more and more, and our department's use of the word processing dept became something of an issue- for them. Soon, I took the Mac to the next level. read about it in the next installment.