March 1985 was a milestone: The month I got my first computer.
That trial run was just long enough for me to fall in love with a device so underpowered that it wouldn’t do a thing until you inserted a 400K floppy disk containing the operating system and (if you were miserly with your storage) an application or three.
I considered some of the other non-graphic-user-interface computers on the market in 1984, but the words of BIES’ Dave Leonard stick with me today: “If you buy a Macintosh, you’re buying the future.”
And, indeed, I bought myself a fine future that month—for the equivalent of about $7,000 in 2025 money (plus another inflation-adjusted $2,000 for the dot-matrix Imagewriter printer.)
1985 being my final year of non-parenthood, I took a whole week of vacation just to play with the thing—learning the niceties of computer keyboards vs. traditional typewriters; the art of find-and-replace (Was it case-sensitive? Did spaces and punctuation count?) and copy-and-paste (Did it include a trailing space or not?); how to change fonts and styles; and how to type extended characters like ellipses, em dashes and curly quotes. Also: The astonishing MacPaint.
Within weeks, I was using that Mac to compose the first of a memorable series of columns for Gold’s First Comics. And within a year and a half, I persuaded my colleagues at WXRT News to move from IBM Selectric typewriters to a Mac. The ability to fix mistakes without having to backspace and X out long passages, and to rearrange paragraphs without relying on scissors and transparent adhesive tape, was transformative. Compare the mess of my typewritten 1986 scripts …
… to the much-cleaner work composed on a Mac beginning in January 1987.
Meanwhile, the children began arriving. Some of their earliest memories—or at least some of my earliest memories of them—have them on my lap, watching letters and pictures appear on that tiny, 9-inch black-and-white screen. The first words they could read included “Save” and “Quit.” (And, later, two of our three sons would take jobs out of college working for the Apple Store; another majored in computer science.)
And the rise of personal computers—and, in the years that followed, the World Wide Web—became a recurring focus for my work at WNUA, where I interviewed …
Not to mention the station’s groundbreaking embrace of …
■ … digital audio editing, where I developed innovative production techniques I’d share beginning in 2013 with our team at the pioneering Rivet news and podcast production firm …
Would any of that have happened had I not bought that first (of many, many to follow) Mac?
Maybe. But that fateful purchase in March 1985 indisputably positioned me well for what was to come. Which is why I can’t bring myself to part with it.
* Business, Industrial, Educational and Scientific.
(Photos: Promo materials from that first test-drive and purchase; and the box still containing that 128K Mac.)
