Today, my kids are doing all of their schoolwork - and classes - on laptops. However, all of my high school teachers required we write everything out in cursive. Honestly, my C64 was still good enough for typing up some homework but that was about it when it came to school use. This was the late 80s, but I definitely remember thinking it made my C64’s chunky print programs pale in comparison. And we had so many font options at our fingertips. To me, at the time, it looked as good as print! I couldn’t believe how sharp the text was on-screen. My smirk dissolved when I saw the tiny, crisp text on the screen. Move out of my way and let me see this little thing up close. I was a Commodore computer guy, and I was a gamer. I remember the first time I saw the little black and white screens, I had a know-it-all smirk on my face. On two tables facing each other we now had two Macintosh computers with black and white screens, and they were linked (presumably using an AppleTalk network) so they could share files. That’s because when I started school as a sophomore, the typesetting machine was pushed into the corner of one office and we entered a whole new paradigm of professional page layout.

No mis-aligned corners or gaps, and no band-aids stored nearby for the occasional oops and slice. Now, you may notice that box is in fact perfect. That was the extent of our graphical influence on the paper’s look and feel. I’ll never forget how we used to have to use specialized thin black line “tape” and X-acto blades to create the boxes around certain content. We had to print everything out and literally glue-stick the strips of copy to large thick sheets of paper that would ultimately get photographed and printed into our school papers. It had purely a textual output with no GUI that I can recall with a rather small, dim screen.

To my recollection it was old, archaic, and seemed to be heavily dependent on special hot-key commands to make it do what she wanted it to do. We had a “typesetting machine” and only my teacher, Mrs. The first year I was on the paper in journalism class, my freshman year, we had no computers. I grew up using black and white Macs when I was on my high school newspaper in the late 1980s (I also had an Apple II+, but that’s a story for another day). He of course had early Apple II’s, but also purchased the original 1984 Macintosh while in college. He’s been a devoted Apple user since the late 1970s, and he’s owned tons of systems and devices across that timeframe. A couple of years ago, I turned around to my CTO who sat adjacent to me in the office and asked, “If you could have only one Macintosh - any, but only one - which would it be?”

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