(Keep Feeling) Fascination (Part III)
(Keep Feeling) Fascination (Part III)
24 April 2010
In 1989, the captivating Apple Macintosh opened my eyes yet again to what a personal computer can do for people. I was a student at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. I would study in the library as I could concentrate on my studies there like no other place including my dorm room. Oddly enough, the quietest place in the library was directly across from the four computers the library had. There were two MSDOS-based computers with amber-colored monochrome monitors that shared a shrill and noisy dot matrix printer on one side of a table and two small, cute looking black-and-white Macintosh SEs that shared a laser printing leviathan called a "LaserWriter IInt" on the other side. Over the many weeks of sitting across from the table holding the computers, I noticed an interesting phenomena: people came in, sat down, typed their papers on the Macs and documents would come out of the laser printer as if they had been professionally typeset. In fact, the printed documents looked exactly as they had on the screen. I was told this was because the Macs' WYSIWYG experience and the Mac's GUI. It was all Greek to me, but intriguing nonetheless. By contrast, people would come in, sit down at the MSDOS machines and struggle with them or the printers often asking me for help. I politely declined saying I didn't know anything about computers...unless, of course, she was cute. I got my first Macintosh, a Mac SE, in 1989 because I felt that computers in the future would be more like a Macintosh than like the kludgy MSDOS-based ones I had seen being "used" in college.