My First Mac

The Mac 512K and Microsoft Word Changed My Life

- 2008.05.22

I remember it well. It was January of 1990. My new husband was a young organic nerdy guy from Palo Alto - his mom translated engineer-speak at Apple into manuals, and his school was awash in Apples. I was older and rougher, a flannel-shirted tomboy from rural Oregon where schools were often awash, another depressed guitar player and hick Kesey-wannabe writer with a massive old manual Royal typewriter and a box of manuscripts.

Mac 512K

The odd little beige box with the tiny black and white screen was just another indication that my beloved was a Genuine Smart Guy, my intellectual equal, and that was all I needed to know.

But one day in the grey slodgy throes of morning sickness and boredom, I idly asked for a demonstration of something on "that little computer".

"It's called an Apple Macintosh 512K," he said proudly. "One slot holds a disk with a program, the other is where you save your work."

The drives whirred and clicked. He explained how to drive the mouse, click on the "icons". On to the real magic, he showed me a program called simply "Word". Type a sentence. Erase. Start over, change the order, substitute something else . . . moving words around with a pointer instead of whiteout and rewrites. Simple. Fun. Economical. Easy.

Omigod.

The next week the manual typewriter went to Goodwill. I loved the chatter of the dot matrix printer spewing out grocery lists, short stories, letters to the editor, original song lyrics. The word nerd was in heaven. I learned to SuperPaint.

Every two years we got a new used Mac from relatives higher up the financial food chain. I got sucked into many hours of BBS. My band was one of the first in Eugene to have a website. The kids became Mac-literate before they were potty-trained.

Now, a dozen used Macs later, I'm a budding multimedia artist squeaking along with a Power Mac 8500 and a Pismo laptop, both maxed out on DIY upgrades. I'm looking to upgrade again, feeling the old anticipation idea of another new-to-me Mac, undoubtedly acquired through dealer links on Low End Mac (just like my last two laptops).

But nothing will ever be as quite as big as the complete paradigm shift that occurred on encountering my first personal computer ever, the Mac 512K. It literally changed my life.

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