Apple Macintosh and the radio man…

Thirty years ago, Steve Jobs unleashed the Apple Macintosh on the world. ‘Apple Macintosh? What’s that?’ I hear the young people ask. Well before iPads, iPhones and iBooks there were these box like things that the world called the Apple Macintosh. It was a quirky little thing prone to crashing, an understated light grey in colour, a floppy drive, and almost no memory at all. I can’t forget them though.

The Apple Macintosh machine revolutionised the way we used home computers. Prior to the Mac computers were really only for geeks who wanted to do geeky things. The Apple Mac fundamentally changed all that and computers weren’t geeky any more. Instead of being simple text-input machines the Macintosh used a graphical interface that allowed us to all to be computer wizards.

The first time I used a Mac over 25 years ago, I knew immediately that it was something special. For one thing I didn’t need an instruction manual; I simply knew how to use it. I could drag and drop and place my cursor on a word to find out what to do next from a drop-down list. It was so easy. At first I thought it was me, I thought that I was a natural. But I soon realised that the interface was so brilliantly intuitive that anybody could use one – as long as they knew how to turn it on and could find the switch at the back.

I’d been doing a bit of freelance design work at the time and realised that if I bought a Mac I might make some money. The nearest Apple Centre was in Sheffield. It wasn’t a shop; it was an office on an industrial estate. I made an appointment and off we went one Saturday morning to pick up our Mac SE. It wasn’t much by today’s standards; a small heavy, solid, chunk of plastic with an eight inch black and white screen, a keyboard, a clunky mouse, and a floppy drive. I can remember the soothing note (bong) as it started up and my machine’s happy computer icon. It was magic.

We spent our Sunday producing a programme for a ‘Lions Club’ fete in Freehand 2.1, learning as we went and by midnight my wife and I were experts – well, almost.

That first Apple Mackintosh cost just over a £1200 and it paid for itself in a month. It looked like something out of William Hartnell’s Tardis, but to me it was a thing of beauty. Over the next 15 years we bought bigger and better Macs and an array of printers, scanners, storage, and copying devices. We had so much equipment that we had to have our cellars converted into an office to contain it - and then we networked it all together with a hub.

My wife gave up her job and worked full time out of our cellar. We didn’t get mega-rich, but we had plenty of spare cash, paid off our debts (not that they were great), had holidays and bought a cottage in Wales. Then one day the work dried up. Our Macs sat gathering dust in our cellar until we took them all to the tip apart from the iMac because I liked the colour of the casing.

Exciting and profitable times, hard work too and all thanks to the Apple Mackintosh. I remember saying to my wife when Steve Jobs died that we owed him a great debt, even though we’d never met him. He and the machine he invented really changed our lives.

These days I’m not a Mac man, I use an old beaten up PC laptop. I have no iPad, no iPhone, no MacBook and I haven’t fired up my iMac for years. I did buy an iPod years ago, but in truth I hardly ever used it. I’m more of a radio man these days.

A radio man. What happened to me?