After waiting weeks—or months, when you’re young there’s very little difference—for his turn to “Test Drive a Macintosh” my father just bought the damn thing. Everything else we’d ever owned had a command prompt. We watched the demos together as a family. We ducked the first time we ejected a disk, since there was no door on the drive. And this is true: the first night I had feverish dreams about building folder hierarchies. I was ten.
Back then what we heard from folks was that the Mac wasn’t a real computer. It was overpriced, impossible to modify, difficult to program. Real programmers used DOS (Linux wasn’t available until I graduated from high school). We demonstrated MacPaint to one of my uncles and he sneered at it; he knew how to draw a circle on the screen using BASIC.
No, the Mac wasn’t computing, it was just moving pictures around. And Mac people weren’t real computer users, they were people too stupid and lazy to learn how to use a real machine.
When I hear people talk about the arrogance and ego of Apple users, that’s what I think about.
It’s also what I’ve been thinking since the iPad announcement. More on that later.
The “Test Drive” ad above was found—along with a scary amount of other archived Apple ephemera—at The Mac Mothership.
Eagerly awaiting chapter two.