Happy Birthday, Mac; you changed the world

T.A. Barnhart

On January 22, 1984, I was living in a shared house on SW Oak, just down the street from Central Catholic High School.  I was working retail but had that Sunday afternoon off, which worked out well that day: Super Bowl Sunday.  The Raiders were playing the Redskins that day, and I'd made two $10 bets on the Raiders, at that time my second-favorite team.  I won those bets, which was nice; that was the game in which Marcus Allen made the amazing 70-some yard run through a bewildered Redskins defense, probably the greatest single run in Super Bowl history.  Winning 20 bucks is always nice (although that's like 47 cents in 2009 dollars), but that's not why I remember that Super Bowl.

Some of you already know why I remember that day, because you have the same memory.  Perhaps you were as overwhelmed as I was, the one and only time a commercial has changed my life.  It was, as anyone who has seen it knows, no ordinary commercial.  Anyone paying attention to technology and the personal computer since the early 80s know the product was nothing ordinary, either.  The commercial, since judged repeatedly as the greatest ever produced, introduced a product that changed the world and led, you can argue, to the election of Barack Obama.

A stunning commercial is one thing; there have been plenty of great commercials over the years, many becoming part of pop and even political culture for a time ("Where's the beef?").  What set the first Macintosh commercial apart is the subject of the ad: the future.  For those of us who transitioned from children's to adult literature via science fiction -- for me, beginning with Robert Heinlein and then moving on to Harlan Ellison -- the arrival of the personal computer was the key step into the future.  The Macintosh "1984" juxtapositioned of Huxley's no-longer-future novel with the kind of sf device we were still waiting for 15 years after Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.  On Super Bowl Sunday, the future at last was ... now.

I used my first Mac at Reed College a few years later; they had an entire lab of them set up (a Reedie was a major part of Apple and apparently helped the college get them).  I was helping produce a newsletter with the family of Ben Linder, a Portland native who had been murdered by the contras in Nicaragua.  His family, eld by his brave mother, Elisabeth, were working hard to draw attention to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush Administration in Central America and how it had brought terrible tragedy to their family.  John, Ben's brother, had gotten permission for us to work at Reed's Mac lab; he wanted the best possible product.  I had been doing the Oregon SANE/Freeze newsletter on my Leading Edge PC (using the hot-wax method of layout, fun in its own way but a lot of trouble).  My Leading Edge was cheap and effective, but not the computer I wanted.  However, we had a baby, so that was my first computer; John got us into the lab to use the better machine.

Early Macs were, of course, a pain in the ass.  No hard drive.  Two floppy drives, but you needed 3 disks: one for the operating system, one for the application and one for data.  The teeny RAM allowed only some of the necessary data required to be stored at any one time, so the user would frequently get into the disk-shuffle routine: the data disk would be ejected so the app disk could be read, then ejected, more data written....  Like I said, a pain in the ass.

I loved it.  My Leading Edge computer was cheap, functional and boring.  I could do word processing, some spreadsheet stuff and bare-minimum database-type activities (usually in WordPerfect, which, by the way, insisted the word "Packwood" should be corrected to "pokeweed").  The Mac was over-priced, insufficiently hardwared and probably the most amazing and fulfilling technology-related experience of my life.  How cool was it?  Even today, as we await the next version of the Mac OS ("Snow Leopard") yearnings for the early Mac OS lead to things like this:

It's hard to explain just how exciting that OS was.  Clunky, black-and-white (no grays), and demanding huge amounts of patience; yet there was nothing with which to compare it.  It was beautiful, transcendent even.  Yes, I know I'm sounding like one of those Mac people, but guess what?  I am one of those Mac people.  I've spent over twenty years being mocked for being one of them, but my devotion to the Mac -- I've owned 6, plus an iPod and now an iPhone -- mute the mockery into a dull whisper of pointless noise.  I cannot explain about how I feel about the Mac: it is love, and it is spiritual, and it has shaped the way I've lived my life since I bought my first Mac, an SE, in 1989.  (With a student discount at PSU.  It took me several months to convince my wife to let me make the purchase, and we had no trouble selling the pc.)

Here are my Macs thru the years:

Using a Mac was the first time in my life that I felt like I was really in-touch with my dreams of the future: technology empowering the human spirit.  So what if it wasn't perfect?  So what if it cost too much?  So what if most of the world was deciding to go cheap and soulless?  That has never been my concern.  If 90% of the computer-using world wanted to hand over their money and computing experience to Microsoft, well, god help them but that's their problem.  For me, the Mac was more than a machine for word processing and number crunching.  I could create things.  MacPaint, of course, and then -- oh how I loved and spent way too much time on this -- Hypercard.  I love making websites, but nothing compares to the exhilaration of using Hypercard (and going through two editions of Danny Goodman's wonderful guide books).

I still love my Mac.  To be able to fly with ease from Mail to Photoshop to iTunes to Facebook to iPhoto to Scrivener to prepping my iPod for the day to....  Well, you get the picture.  Yes, I could do this on a Dell or HP or custom-built PC, but the problem is: I'd be on a PC.  I have used Windows for years, and I do appreciate how much it's improved over time.  But it's still Windows.  Imagine you went to the doctor, and the doctor told you:  "You're going to be just fine.  Don't worry.  But ... You do have to take these pills daily.  Please try not to exert yourself.  Oh, and we don't know about the side affects -- What?  Yes, of course, there will be side effects.  Please describe them to us as you experience them."  With the Mac, the doctor tells me to exercise, eat my vegetables, get my rest; there's nothing wrong with me at ll.

It's especially gratifying, as a True Believer (I might as well get that phrase out of the way; I know it's going to be used at some point), to see the Mac integrated into society.  Simplicity, ease-of-use, beauty; these are characteristics of all Apple products and we see the result: People want them.  Millions of iPods and iPhones, the most innovative computers, designs that are mimicked in products from vacuum cleaners to automobiles to the new traffic signals in downtown Portland.  But that's the most superficial aspect of the Mac Effect on the modern world.  More fundamentally, the true effect of the Macintosh, and Apple, on the world is the design of objects and systems that make technology a means, not an end. 

Technology that requires the user to focus on the tool, the object, is a failure.  If we had to focus the kind of thought and energy Windows so often requires of us on, say, a car, most of us would be riding the bus.  Or a horse.  All people want is to flip the switch and have it work.  That's what Macs and iPods do.  And that philosophy, that goal of getting the technology out of people's way -- and making it sexy to look at and hold -- is what sets Apple apart.  It's why websites like Flickr and Facebook are so popular: a little set-up and you are posting thousands of pictures, talking to dozens of friends.  AOL's one continuing success is AIM: just start it and start chatting. 

Or go to barackobama.com, register in a few easy steps, and become part of the largest political change effort in the history of the world.

Would that have happened in a world without the Mac?  Well, given that Jobs and Wozniak got many of their critical ideas from Xerox's PARC labs -- the mouse, the graphical user interface (gui) and more -- it's entirely possible.  But the one key ingredient -- Steve Jobs -- is probably the unique feature not to have been replicated under different circumstances.  Had he not been the vision behind Apple, we may have had easy-to-use computers, but computers that are Macintoshes?  I don't think so.  And if instead of the Mac we had really nice computers that were easy to use, would our conceptions of human-technology relationships been of the kind that would have led to a gui-based Web, to user-friendly devices and pages?

Impossible to say, of course, and moot.  We have Macs, we have Jobs and we have the understanding that to make technology successful, it needs to be as transparent to users as possible ("we" in this sense does not include Microsoft, of course).  In 2003, we had some clever people who helped capture the national energy behind Howard Dean and demonstrate what is possible for a political campaign to accomplish.  Then in 2007 and 2008, the Obama campaign picked up the Dean program and took it to the house.  The White House.  And yet, that's really just the barest glimpse into what is possible.  That was a crude instrument of social change: gather lots of names, lots of money, lots of volunteer hours.  Pound the people until you win the damn election.  In 2009, the goal is to refine the potential.  It's not enough to simply get 270 electoral votes; now Pres Obama needs a vast and diverse array of Americans to provide energy behind specific, and multiple, policy efforts.  This campaign, if successful, will not merely result in political change; it will demonstrate how the world can be reshaped in unprecedented ways.

And yes, the possibilities frighten me as much as they tantalize me.

Recall the "1984" ad.  The context: a grey, dull world of oppression and thought control.  What happened when the screen was shattered and the truth revealed?  Did everyone suddenly find themselves in paradise?  Well, when I got my Macintosh SE, my class assignments were no easier to write than with my pc.  Through the years and all the improvements in the Mac OS (I remember the excitement of OS 6 and 7, the breakthroughs that made simply playing on the desktop so much fun), it's never changed the sad simple truth that I still had to take the time and use the energy to write a letter, finish a project, do the work myself.  The Mac is not a panacea for anything but a Microsoft-free life.  You still need displine, education, resolve, creativity, all them hard-work virtues that are impossible to escape if you actually want to accomplish something and not just think about it.

Happy Birthday to the Macintosh.  Argue about which platform is best, which is most effective or efficient (no insult to Linux users out there, but I've no experience therein), which is bla bla bla.  I don't care.  Love your pc?  Hooray for you.  It's so not the point.  The world did indeed change with the introduction of the Macintosh computer.  Whether these are the best products or not, it is clear to me that they have reshaped technology and thereby changed the world.  Ok, the Mac SE is not responsible for the election of Barack Obama, but I find it hard to believe his campaign could have happened in a text-based, keyboard-controlled, non-gui world.

An ad for the 20th Anniversary Mac said it best:  "...Apple design engineers have been building bridges between what people dream about and the technology that can make those dreams reality."

Before January 22, 1984, I only dreamed of the future.  Beginning that day, I lived it.

By T.A. Barnhart Jan. 25, 2009