The things you find in your attic
How this particular box with its veritable treasure trove survived countless moves without me being aware of its existence is beyond me, but man, I hit the geek nostalgia jackpot. It's got old copies of Wired, Macworld, Computer Graphics World, and others. Still-working install CD-ROMs containing such titles as Photoshop 3 and Director 5. FLOPPIES of Oregon Trail! Damn, what a find. It's going to take a while to go through all this stuff (and hopefully get some of the digital artifacts running, lack of floppy drive be damned), but for now, let's talk Exhibit A:
This is the oldest magazine I have in the stack, an issue of Macworld from May 1994. The cover story was on the brand new PowerPC-based PowerMacs, which came in three flavors and ran up to 80 MHz. The word "screamer" was thrown around like rice at a wedding, and while we can collectively guffaw from our position in front of multicore multigig computers from a safe distance of thirteen years, I remember as a proud owner of a 7100/66 AV with 8 MB of RAM that yes, those buggers were indeed blazing fast at the time. Anyway, reading through the issue was definitely a blast from the past, but what might be fun here is to throw a few sentences from both the magazine content as well as the ads your way. Try these on for size:
"Apple recently outlined its system software strategy for the next several years... Copland ('System 8'), a future operating system, may arrive in 1995."
Godot had a better chance of showing up. But hey, Copland's colossal failure led to Apple buying NeXT, and the return of Steve Jobs.
"Gone are the days when we bought all our software at computer dealers... a new rival has come to town in the form of electronic software catalogs on CD-ROM."
Well, the first part of the sentence holds up, at least.
"SyQuest has announced a Mac version of its 3.5-inch, 270MB removable hard drive mechanism."
I remember those damn things. Expensive, cumbersome, unreliable. Just what you wanted in a backup solution. My entire hard drive was only 500MB at the time, though, so 270MB seemed pretty good. Then the Zip drive came along... better stop before I turn a long post into a really long post.
"The main problem with switching to RISC, of course, lay in the deep investment Macintosh users had in their software."
Sound familiar?
"The intelligent newspaper of the future is available now with Ensemble Information Systems' Relevant, a Mac interface to Dow Jones's electronic news feed DowVision."
So close... right on the cusp of the Web exploding. It was definitely an overarching theme across the entire issue.
"...Apple has decided to make it easy for Windows users to buy Macs, basically selling them a Windows PC—and promising a good one, at that—and throwing the Mac in for free."
Wait—what year is this again?
"As the highest rated program ever reviewed in MacWeek, Kai's Power Tools is unmatched."
Dueling memories annihilating each other! KPT! MacWeek! Feedback loop... fatal error... NO CARRIER
"...Even if you've never worked in multimedia, Director 4.0 can help you develop the most persuasive presentations, most inspired CD-ROM titles, most entertaining kiosks, most enlightening demos, most realistic visualizations, and most anything else you have in mind."
You have to remember that Director was the undisputed king of the hill when it came to multimedia for a very long time.
"Now you can access your office from anywhere you happen to be. Bummer."
This was from an Apple Remote Access ad. Folks are still saying that, especially those who have failed to just say no to Crackberry.
"Point, shoot, plug it into your computer, and presto—you've discovered Apple digital photography."
The QuickTake 100 took crap pictures, but you knew that it was a sign of things to come. I shot an entire facebook with one when I was little more than a glorified intern at my first job out of college, and even though the images sucked, everyone was fascinated with the thing.
"So before you buy another Mac, stop and ask some questions. Find out where Apple is going, especially with the PowerPC. Then ask Intel about the Pentium processor. What you find out might put you on a whole new path."
This was an Intel ad questioning Apple's switch to PowerPC processors. Two years later, the Mac platform was in serious trouble, what with many artists (myself included) having already done or about to do just what the Intel ad was advocating. And now Macs run on Intel chips.
At any rate, I could go on all day with this. Needless to say, what a fascinating trip back in time, with equal parts "oh yeah, I remember that" mixed in with a surprising amount of "man, that really hasn't changed all that much." Anyway, more on the magic nostalgia box in future posts.
Posted at 11:00AM May 22, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Random | Comments[0]
