May 21
Mac nostalgia
2004 at 05.35 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Today I’m going to take you back to my first adventures on a computer, an Apple Macintosh with system 7. Back in 1992 I started my business on an Apple Quadra 700 with system 7 with 8 MB of RAM and a 140 MB hard drisk. Before this I had my very first steps in Adobe Illustrator 3 on a Macintosh IIf with system 6. That’s when I learned to create logos, illustrations and layouts on a computer. And boy did I love working on it! It made me realize where the future of graphic design was going.
From that moment on I knew that the Mac would take a special place in my daily life. I was one of those students that prefered working on a computer instead of using pencils and paint for artwork. Not that I don’t love drawing and painting, I do, I do a lot, but I saw a different world of creativity and unlimited possiblities… yes I know I was way ahead of time :-D “Unlimited” is almost the case now, but certainly not at all back then. 
Anyhow, when I think about where we’re coming from, I see a huge world of difference and I look back with a lot of nostalgia. The Macintosh was really ahead of its time. The interface was graphical from the very beginning (1984) and we still use some of the basics in our interface: the folder icons, the menu bar on top, the Apple icon on the top left etc. Except that there is a huge difference on how things look graphically and of course the way things work now: dropshadows, transparency, ...
For anyone who wants to go back in time again, taste some nostalgia and feel how it was back in the day when desktop publishing was still a revolution, surf to this amazing website. Start your old Macintosh SE, click around and look under the file menu and see MacDraw and MacWrite, the very first graphical programs before Adobe, Aldus, Quark… Have fun with Pong or some other game. In other words enjoy your weekend! ;-)
7served
1
Memories… Don’t forget to also check out http://www.folklore.org/
2
Wow - suddenly I’m right back there! If I remember rightly, wasn’t system 7 the first one that let you have 2 apps open at once?
3
There was Multi Finder in System 6 which made it possible to have more than 1 application open.
The good old times… When I was 14, I started with an Apple ][ followed by an Apple //e with 16k more memory, lowercase characters and 24 lines of 80 characters on the screen....
Those times were really exited. Computers were something special. There is only once a first generation of personal computers. There was no Windows, no IBM PC. Not everything was taken for granted.
Then when I saw the first Mac in 1984, I had to have it. Today I still use the Mac daily. I’m still smiling.
4
Jon, yes that’s right if I’m not mistaken. I remember indeed just like Patrick mentioned here, that there was a program called Multi Finder which people used under system 6 to switch between the Finder and a running app. Don’t know if you are familiar with MacTracker, a history of all Macs, even with the startup sounds etc.
Do you remember all those extentions that we added to give our Mac more capabilities or to add some fun stuff. For instance I added Aaron Light and Aaron Fat to give the Mac interface the Copland look, in other words the system 9 look (or was it in system 8 already?). Then there was After Dark screensaver, Tweety ....
5
After dark - flying toasters ahoy!! Such simple days…
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Even tho I wasn’t around yet at the time or I was like one years old, it was still interesting to experience the old Apple OS. Most of the features back then are still used in OS X today.
7
When I was about 6 years old, we Macintosh Lisa 2 as our home computer. We also had a very noisy dot matrix printer. It made the most crummy printouts but it was so much fun! I made all kinds of things in the MacPaint and then print them onto mailing labels and stick them on my bedroom door! Mac’s were SO ahead of their time back then, it’s incredible.
Although these days you can’t beat Windows XP for general use. At last, a Windows that is stable. It has only crashed once in the two years I’ve had it installed, and that’s cos my mate pulled out a PCI card while it was turned on!