Friday, April 9, 2010

Apple Mac 25th Anniversary: A personal take

Apple Macintosh computer, model M001, with keyboard and mouse. The Apple Macintosh was designed by Steve Jobs to be as 'user-friendly' as possible.

More than 21 years ago, I got my hands on an Apple Mac for the first time. It was a Mac Plus, one of those little cream-coloured boxes with a built-in, black-and-white 9in screen that we all thought looked so wackily futuristic in the way the DMC DeLorean had earlier that decade.

I was a sub editor working on a local newspaper in Kent. I wrote headlines, checked facts and spelling and designed the odd page. I had trained using pen and paper and moved on to editing on terminals hooked up to a mini system. In 1988, our first PCs had arrived – machines built around a blistering Intel 286 processor and Microsoft DOS. Editing was now in colour but it was still command-based – entering changes to copy was a matter of inputting code into galleys of type.

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