From the Desk of the Liquid Engineer

My family is, by and large, into antiques. One of my aunts actually works at an antique store (furniture, dolls, knick-knacks, a gorgeous blue-green 1950s bicycle hanging from the ceiling by chains that no-one’s bought in at least 12 years, etc.). I’ve never really been into this kind of antique quite as much, probably in part because I moved to Dallas (and away from the antique store) when I was seven. The fact that I’m a bit clumsy and tend to break fragile things if I’m not very careful also makes me less likely to want to be surrounded on all sides by expensive fragile things.

That said, as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown more of an appreciation for this kind of stuff, and my antique bug has always manifested itself in the form of a love of computer antiques (which I count as anything before Windows and the Mac became mainstream), which I love. Before the Windows/Mac hegemony, computing was really a lot more like the Wild West in terms of innovation and discovery of new technology than it is today, and part of me wishes I could’ve been around for that. It was surely an exciting time. I don’t get too nostalgic because I love my 21st century computer technology, but I quite regularly get jealous of those people who create their own personal antique machine museums. I’d have probably picked up an antique machine before, but I really have neither the money nor the space for such a hobby. I do have a How Computers Work book from the early 1980s aimed at parents wanting to buy their children computers, picked up from the antique store where my aunt works. It contains information on “microcomputers” that contain exciting new technology like “hard drives.” There’s even a bunch of BASIC listings, because that was the time when you pretty much had to learn to program to get the most out of your machine.

Too bad it’s not still that way. A lot of people would have a much better understanding of technology.

Anyhow, the reason I bring all this up is because John Gruber over at Daring Fireball* linked to a very well done set of scans of the original Macintosh User Manual. Take a look at that: it was the instruction manual sent with every single one of the original Macintosh 128k computers in 1984. You hear about how much more effort was put into things and how much nicer they were back in the day, but this is still kind of hard to believe. I mean, look at that. I’ve seen magazines that don’t look that nice. And now when you buy a Windows PC you’re lucky to even get a full restore disk included in the box**. Forget printed manuals. One of the downsides of transitioning from a hobbyist pursuit to a commodity, I fear.

So, anyone else have some good computer nostalgia stories/thoughts?

*This is, oddly, not the strangest name for a Mac related website. See Drunken Batman.
**You can make your own restore disks, but that’s hardly the point. I just dropped a several hundred (thousand?) on a new system, and I’m still expected to make recovery disks. (As a sidenote, Macs don’t include recovery disks. They include full system installation DVDs with recovery capabilities, which is even better. When was the last time you bought a computer that came with a full (not upgrade or restore) copy of Windows? Does anyone even sell computers that come with said full copies?)

[tags]mac, macs, macintosh, macintoshes, apple history, apple, marketing, book, manual, instruction manual, nostalgia, old tech, old technology[/tags]

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