I don’t normally like to do ‘filler’ blog entries, but I’ve been too busy to write. With all apologies for the long time gap between entries, I’m going to have to ask for your prolonged patience. This has been, and continues to be, a very busy week. In a good way.
I’ll be celebrating two birthdays tonight and tomorrow, AND rehearsing with IrishBand. Sunday I’m sleeping in and listening to This American Life, then meeting with a guy who wants me to produce one of his songs, and THEN I’m seeing a movie with a new friend.
I’ll letcha know how it all goes, and hopefully even manage to take a few pictures. It promises to be a great weekend.
Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh. It was called the Banana Junior 6000.
You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way. Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .
. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:
This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large. Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it. I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue. The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world. Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.
Still rings true today, eh?
I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’ That’s just pure genius. Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.
Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips. Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either. My hat’s definitely off to both of them.
Apple just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and I thought it would be fun to scrounge up the original television ad for it, from 1984. It’s a classic.
The ad had a bit of a resurgence in 2008, when a parody of it was used for the Obama presidential campaign.
Here’s the first real life introduction of a Macintosh computer, hosted by the ubiquitous Steve Jobs, but the Mac speaks for itself, both figuratively and literally.
Before that, in 1983, there was a super-weird industry event called the “Macintosh Dating Game,” which was emceed by Steve Jobs, and which featured three software CEO’s, two of whom have become historical also-ran’s, but one of whom is someone who you will no doubt recognize.
It’s interesting in hindsight that Apple spent so much time taking pot shots at IBM, when Microsoft was the company they should really have been paying attention to.
There’s so much more I could share about all this. I find the early days of the personal computer industry endlessly fascinating, because that’s when it was all being born, and I was just the right age to be interested in all of it, and what’s more important for this entry, just the right age to remember and be able to share it these many years later.
Now, as back then, Macs comprise about ten percent of the market, but as Douglas Adams famously said in an ad (which I’ve so far been unable to scrounge up), “They may have only ten percent, but it’s clearly the top ten percent.” Well said, Douglas, well said.
If you’re so inclined, here’s an interesting collection of articles called 25 Years of Macintosh for you to share and enjoy.
