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The year was 1980-something. My Dad came home with the latest
item that "fell offa da truck" - a spanking new WYSE PC. It was one
of the first IBM clones, it ran DOS, and it boasted a color screen
and a 10 meg hard drive.
Having no computer experience at all it was beyond frustrating
trying to use it, and my Dad's eighth-grade Italian education and
years of masonry and restaurant experience . . . well,
let's say he was no source of enlightenment there behind the mouse.
The two phone book sized user manuals were boring and full of so
much "pertinent info" they were almost useless.
The WYSE sat around for many years. My younger brother had
figured out enough to boot up a couple of games, and he was content
with that. No one else touched it because of the disappointment it
never failed to give when a bright eyed boy would sit at its
keyboard with visions of the powerful untapped world of personal
computing only to be stonewalled by the C: prompt, and
those fateful words "Abort? Retry? Ignore?"
Years later, the printing industry, with which I fell enamored,
went digital. I had been trained extensively in conventional
lithographic offset and was a journeyman in my trade when the
bottom seemed to fall out, yielding to desktop
publishing and clunky, proprietary computer imaging systems. I
scored an apprentice position learning a DuPont scanning system and
this happened to interface with an Apple
IIfx running Adobe Photoshop, version 2.0. I was hooked. All my
tinkering and exploring was intuitive, fruitful, and it was
fun! Fellow users were very happy to show me - brag to me -
about what the Mac could do.
It wasn't long before I shelled out cash for a used Centris 610 of my own. It was a powerful
machine at that time and had, wonder of wonders, a built in CD
drive and a whopping 250 meg hard drive!
The wonders never ceased after that.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: 17" iMac G4/800 MHz, July 2002 - The iMac 'grows up' with a 17" 1440 x 900 display.
Group of the Day: MichiMac is our list for Mac users in Michigan.
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