Most of my reading, watching & listening these days is
off the Net. This includes the full gamut of regular news from local to
worldwide and all the specialty news sites from professional/business to
personal articles. I think I have about 40+ sites that I try to get to daily or
at least every few days. Then there are what I like to call the fun or humorous
sites that give me a laugh or two. And of course the social media sites like
Facebook etc.
Smaller chunks of news are the wave of the future for most people
as technologies implode, meaning phones, tablets, computers and TV’s merge.
It’s exciting to see all this unfolding and it reminds me in a more modest way
of the Macintosh’s introduction back in 1984.
Up until that time, PC’s were basically
MS/DOS or CPM based and what you saw on the screen were ASCI or text only
pages. I remember going to San Francisco
to see the Mac launch, as I owned an Apple retail store at that time. At first
we watched George Orwell’s “1984” Macintosh video/ad, which also ran during the
Superbowl. This had the audience on their feet as it was simply amazing, and if
you haven’t seen it, take a peek below...
Steve Jobs takes the stage to the music of Irene Cara’s
“What a Feeling”, and you can see the insanely great beam of light coming from his demeanor.
This was no doubt a great flash in history and Jobs was going to “strut his
stuff” for all it was worth in front of the world. Two programs were ready to
launch… MacWrite and MacPaint. At first Jobs demonstrates MacWrite and the
crowd goes wild seeing how text and fonts can be changed in an instant.
Remember before we were dealing with straight text on the screen and now it was
text appearing as a graphical font… easily manipulated.
Next came MacPaint and if the audience loved MacWrite it was
absolute chaos for Paint. WYSIWYG was the buzz word, meaning “What you see is
what you get” and even though the first Mac was just black and white, one could
not help but witness that Jobs had just changed the future. As I sat there,
bedazzled with everyone else, I remembered purchasing my first Apple II
computer in 1979 and how that propelled me into this fantastic wave of
technology. I also remembered that I had 20+ orders for the Mac to fill when I
got home. Most were already prepaid ($4999) and we made a cool $2500 profit on
each one. We also got to take a Mac home with us in our own cute little Mac
bag.
It was a sad day when we lost
Jobs but his memory and accomplishments, including the Mac launch, will live
forever. What a feeling… indeed!
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