777: Setup Nostalgia
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Welcome to a very special Mac Power Users Holiday Special. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hey, David. How are you? Happy holidays. You too. I'm wearing a Santa hat right now. Okay. And I installed one of those machines in the studio, so it's just slowly putting artificial snow on me throughout the episode. Okay.

So if I make any typos in the outline, it's because I can't see my keyboard. I'm just kind of randomly hitting buttons. Perfect. But it's good, right? Yeah. It's a holiday special. We should do that. It's the holiday special. Yeah. So we thought we'd have fun this year on our holiday special.

So we're going to talk about Mac setups that we love. And it's interesting because we both did this independently and we both wrote about some of our very first setups. I think it's that thing where like you go back to, you know, your, your younger years. Yeah. Maybe with your favorite band, but also maybe with your favorite Mac.

Yeah, you know, we both picked sort of college era things, which is interesting. Obviously a very formative time for both of us. Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to have a little fun, and we're going to go back in time and talk about our dream setups earlier in life. And Stephen, you want to go first? Yeah, so I picked 20 years ago. It was not necessarily my first Mac setup, but one that I...

I have the most nostalgia for the one that meant, meant a lot to me at the time. Uh, so 20 years ago, I was wrapping up my first semester of college at the university of Memphis. And I was a full-time student.

I've talked about this in the past. I took eight years to finish my almost eight years to finish my undergraduate. Don't do that. I went full time for basically three and a half years and then like very slowly trickled through the rest of my program. But in those early years, the Mac that I had with me was my titanium Mac.

PowerBook G4. And, you know, I'd been introduced to the Mac in high school with a bunch of beige machines and the, of course, the iMac G3, very influential in that timeframe. But the titanium PowerBook got handed to me at a job that I had in high school and college. I worked for my college newspaper, but I also worked at this nonprofit. It's actually where I met my wife in high school.

And a bunch of my friends that still have today all came out of that job at this nonprofit. And I was doing media and design work for them and was given basically the best titanium power book ever made. It was one gigahertz G4 with a gigabyte of memory, I think 60 gig hard drive. And unbelievable to me looking back.

The owner or the founder, the person in charge is like, hey, use this at work and like you can take it with you. Like you can use it as your own computer. Bananas to tell that to a 17 year old Stephen Hackett. But he did. Yeah. I had long hair and earrings. I was in a phase. He's like, God, use it. That was great. And so that was the machine that I quote unquote took to college, even though I went to school in my hometown. I didn't live on campus. So it was the computer in the dorm.

And it was awesome. You know, by 2004, the aluminum power books had come out. My roommate had an aluminum power book and his could do the ripple effect when you added a widget to dashboard and mine couldn't. And I was jealous of that. I can now confess. Okay. It was sick. Drop a widget on. It's like the tie book. Couldn't do that. But it was this thin 15 inch powerhouse. And yeah,

Uh, I used it for schoolwork. I used it some at the college paper. So a lot of this time is also tied up with that. I didn't know this at the time, but as an incoming freshman, I just like walked into the college newspaper, the advisor's office. And I was like, hi, you should hire me. Um, they didn't, they never took incoming freshmen as staff. Like I was it. And it was because I just, I guess had the bravery to go in there and like

put a resume on her desk and a portfolio and be like, Hey, I've done this design work. Like I went to come work for you. And, um, and so the power book would come with me to work every night, even though I had a, a quick silver power Mac G four at my desk at the paper, my power book was actually faster. And so there were some like big layout work I would do on the power book and then move over, you know, just move over the network to the quick silver. But that laptop, man, it, I used it for a long time and it, uh,

was incredible to have this computer that was not mine, but effectively was given to me by this job. And so much of what I do now has its little roots in that PowerBook. But it was joined by a third-generation iPod. So think about 2004, right? We are...

just a handful of years into the iPod. iPod was in 2001. So by 04, but especially by like 05 and 06, the iPod was everywhere on campus. And I had a third generation iPod and with the buttons, people say that's a bad iPod. And I just refuse to believe it. The buttons were great. Totally fine. Totally fine. And I, man, I just, I cannot overstate the,

how ubiquitous the iPod was in my college experience. White headphones everywhere. It was the cultural moment. In fact, I found this when looking through some things. I found, I don't even remember the app that made it, but there was some Mac app that would like look at your iTunes library and give you an HTML page you could put on your website so people could like see what music you had. It didn't link to anything. It didn't do anything. It was just like a table.

But at the top of that, I had this quote from a campus minister that I knew. And it was, you can learn a lot about someone by looking at what is on their iPod. And that was...

So true. And I even wrote about the iPod in the college paper. I'll link to that in the show notes. But it was a real thing. And it was right in that moment of the iPod halo effect. And throughout college, more and more people around me had Macs because of the iPod. I was just their front row seat for it. And even though it wasn't a perfect laptop by any means, it is one that really...

Man, it was a great setup for me for a really long time. Did you know then that the Mac was going to become such a focus and the Apple products were going to be so important to you? I mean, the roots were there. The idea of using the Mac to take an idea and put it into the world, that was pretty established in me in college. That started in high school, but was definitely true in college.

But I had no idea that all of that would lead to what it is now, where I get to talk about this stuff for a living. I was interested in it. I was talking about it with people. I was writing about it a little bit. This is before I was blogging. But it always seemed like a cool interest and not something that could ever become a job. And I'm very fortunate that it did eventually become a job. What were your primary apps, if you remember, on that computer? Yeah, man, the one that I remember...

The most or two that I remember the most one was ADM, which I think is still technically around, but it was an AOL client and chat client for the Mac. So this is like, I chat was already out, but if you wanted to connect to more than one thing or you wanted to do it with real customization, ADM was, was the one. And so it really, like I had my like buddy list of,

was you were green if you were online and yellow if you were idle, like all this customization and custom sounds, you know, custom icons. And that was really fun to be able to really get your experience dialed in the way you wanted to. But the other one I really remember from that time was Camino, which was a web browser that, if my memory serves me correctly, was the Gecko app.

rendering engine out of Firefox. But at the time, Firefox didn't have a good Mac UI. And so Camino was like Aqua UI, like we're talking 2004, right? So pinstripes and bubbly buttons and stuff because Safari wasn't very good. Safari was still pretty new and it took some time for it to kind of get its sea legs. And so those apps, man, I used all the time because even then,

A lot of stuff that I was doing for school, like, yeah, I was writing in, you know, Microsoft Word, you know, Office X or whatever. But there was still a lot of stuff on the web to do even then. And so Camino was my window into the internet. Yeah, that makes sense. And I do remember that app. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. And it was just, it was a fun time. Like, OS X was still very young and there were some weird ideas. Yeah.

in OS 10 back in the day. Um, but it was very exciting because there were like new apps to try all the time. And, you know, I, this is like when I started using RSS for the first time, right. It's like, Oh, I'm gonna download a bunch of like net news wire, but also, uh, newsfire and Vienna, like all these different apps and, and seeing what worked and what didn't. And it was a, it was a very fun time to be in the, in the Mac community because I was 10 was so new and there were, uh,

Of course, the established players who were moving from the classic Mac OS to OS 10, but OS 10 also made it possible for people to write their first Mac apps or to like bring new ideas to life. So I felt like I was getting to experiment all the time with new tools. I did mention that I wrote a little bit about the iPod. I put it on Five Dope Books a couple of weeks ago. I'll have a link in the show notes. Because I did design at the college newspaper, I actually didn't get to write anything.

that much for the paper itself, right? Like I was writing headlines and captions, but I wrote very few articles. And at some point, so this was in 2006. So I'd been there a couple of years and I talked my way into a like weekly, I think it was, maybe it was monthly, a column covering tech news. It was called Weekend Geek. Sorry, not great. You can look at the link, you can see the

uh there's a dog cow in the header see so you know it's me um yeah but uh i you know i got to explore like writing about these things and you know this is like um this example article uh i picked because it was the ipod's fifth anniversary um in october of 2006 so i wrote about this a

And also when this is like Vista is in here and it was a different time. Firefox 2.0 gets a mention. But it was the beginning of me kind of experimenting with this stuff. And as much as I love the Titanium PowerBook and as much as I love this iPod, what makes this setup nostalgic for me is that it was all this exploration of what can these things do?

Can I like talk about them in a way that, you know, people will experience and read? And I didn't write this column very long. Like it didn't do very well, but it was fun. And having, having that experimentation was important to me. And that's why this setup is one that I love. Yeah. I get it. Get it. This episode of Mac power users is made possible by one password.

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Head on over to 1password.com slash MPU to learn more and to sign up for a free 30-day trial. And when you do, you'll get 20% off. That's 1password.com slash MPU. It's funny to me listening to you talk about your favorite or this nostalgic Mac that you didn't own because I also did not own my college Mac.

I got it via a job. I was involved with student government and I had a position where they gave you a Mac plus. Okay. So I had it available to me and I didn't have the money for a Mac plus.

And I was, of course, super into computers. We've talked about even back in middle school when it was the Timex Sinclair computer that you hooked to your TV and stuff. I always wanted new hardware. And I always wanted. And I also was very curious about the Mac+. I had some exposure to the Atari ST, which was at the time kind of like a cheap copy of the Mac. But it was really good for multimedia. But I had exposure to one of those towards the end of high school.

But I never really got to spend time on a Mac until I got this computer. I looked it up. It was one megabyte of RAM. Okay. The screen was 512 by 342.

And that is not per inch. That is, the screen was 512 by 342. That's where my blog gets its name from. From that original Macintosh display resolution. On that glorious nine inch screen, which it never seemed small to me. It seemed perfect. I love that computer. So, you know, as someone who grew up kind of during the computer revolution, did a lot of command line stuff, I...

I got my hands on... I didn't have any money as a kid. I was a kid, right? But I got my hands on whatever I could at school from friends or whatever. I had a friend whose parents bought him an Atari 800, and I programmed that for him. Any computer I could get access to, I would work on. But I'd always heard about Macs, and then I finally got access to one. And it was just honestly love at first sight. I mean, the Mac...

You'd have to be there, but the Mac was such a breath of fresh air in how to use a computer at the time. I mean, everybody at the time really was, it was all command line stuff. And I'm sure there's people listening who will say command line is still the best, but the, um, but that you are also dating yourself. If you're saying that, I'll tell you that, um, but the, um,

But, you know, Apple did UI better than anybody else did it. Just, I mean, the IBM, like, mouse interface stuff was just god-awful. And the Atari was fine, but it was made after the Mac, if I believe. I think it was, like, called Trammell OS or something. But it was okay. But the Mac just got it right. Yeah.

And, you know, the Susan care icons and just the way everything worked and the compromises they made, those machines were, you know, processor wise, they were incredibly compromised, right? You know, one megabyte of Ram to run the whole thing. You had to get the operating system, the software, everything in that one Meg. And I have no clue what the storage was, but you know, this is 1988. So it was a while ago. And yeah,

But boy, it just did all the little things right. And I just fell in love with that computer so hard. So much so that I'm sitting here all these years later on a podcast called Mac Power Years. I really credit it to that. When I built the studio, you sent me a Susan Kerr artwork of the original control panel. Because I've told you this story. When you see the control panel of those original Macs, it's so elegant and beautiful.

done so well. It's like the person who thought this much about the control panel, well, they must've thought that much about everything else. And this is what I want to use. And, um, and so I, you know, I kept the job in student government largely so I could have access to that computer. I had a key and we had a computer lab and I did all my work and everything, but man, I, that got me through school largely. And we had, and best of all,

We had a laser writer in, in the suite, you know, and it was like a big deal. Like if you wouldn't send something to print, like you had to like talk to the guy and like, you could not print drafts out. They had the dot matrix in there. You could, students were allowed to use a dot matrix, but you had to get like permission to use the laser writer. Yeah.

But always when I got to the end of a long project for class or something, I would, you know, sweet talk the guy into letting me print the final out on the laser writer. And that was a whole nother like transformative experience because I

printers were so bad and so loud. And then suddenly this, this, you know, this Buick looking thing in the office would just put out something like that looked like it had come from a printing press, at least to my eyes. But the thing about this, the reason why this computer came to mind when we talked about nostalgia is because the experience of using a properly made user interface and the

I saw that when I was all of 19 years old, and I realized that this is going to change everything. I became a believer in computers for mass market when I saw the Mac for the first time. I grew up with them. I was definitely on the fringe of my little nerd community and my ability to use them.

But I never really saw them as an appliance type device until I saw my first Mac and really spent time with it. I mean, they just got it right. I mean, that team that did the first Mac. Everybody tells me, well, yeah, this would have happened with or without Apple. Somebody would have got there eventually. I don't know. It would have been a long time, I think. I think so, too. Yeah. Because it was just a unique group of weirdos.

That, you know, and they had Steve Jobs running them. I mean, it's just the whole thing happened in a way that I'm not sure would have, would have happened in a big company. Yeah. In any other big company, let me say. Yeah. And what's so, what's so interesting about the Mac plus, and I'm sure you weren't thinking about this at the time, but yeah,

It was, it proved that the idea worked, you know, they had the one 28 and they had the five 12, but the plus was like, it introduced scuzzy, right. It went to four megabytes of, of Ram. Like it was the first Macintosh that in many ways was more than just what the box was that you could expand it and do the other things. And it, I think it was the, for the first time, like, Oh, this can be, this can be a quote unquote real computer. And it,

you know, I think it, I think it deserves a lot of credit for that. And I'm sure that, you know, like when young sparks went in there and it was, you know, uh, in this shared space and you got to sit down in front of it. Like, I can't imagine how much like the future it must've felt compared to what, what else was out there. Yeah. I mean, it had a hard drive in it, but it was small. And, um, I think I had a hard drive. I'm pretty sure it did. Yeah. And then the, uh,

But like I said, it just really showed the way. I mean, looking back at the text, I was pretty, you know, I was pretty, you know, current on all the different things that were out there. Like I knew, I worked at Radio Shack when I was in high school. I sold Tandy computers and like I knew what was available. And to me, it was like so far above the close. I mean, there were Commodore and Atari was kind of like chasing Apple a bit at the time.

And I spent plenty of time with those operating systems, but Apple was just so far ahead. And it wasn't even like the processing power. It was just the way they put the bits together to make it use. I could just immediately see that. Oh yeah, this is just going to be the, this is going to take over. I felt like,

Like if I had money, I would have bought Apple stock. You know, it just seemed so obvious to me that, that they had it figured out and nobody else really had a clue at the time. Yeah. You know, I think it biases me to this day. I think it biases me that, that kind of prejudice I developed at that point.

No, no, I get it. And it looks like the plus the hard drive did not come with a hard drive, but you could add one. So, you know, probably still doing a lot of floppy disk action, I'm sure. No, I had my all my data was on disks and I would swap it out. And like, but, you know, I would get the job I got.

was pretty important in student government. And in that, that gave me like priority on the machine, but I was using it for schoolwork. I, and I was like customizing it, you know, back to the extent you could back then. And man, that, that computer was awesome. It had the little keyboard. I know they had one with a keypad on it, but I had the little one.

And that one button mouse, I mean, it was just like all the original Mac stuff. Yeah. In my mind, I don't know the history of who cobbled this thing together. There were two or three of them where in the space we worked, but there was one that was kind of like assigned to me. And, you know, the keyboard was filthy. Probably all these students had used it over the several years, but the man, yeah.

It really changed my outlook as to how computing could work. And there was no internet or anything, although we did have some connectivity because I could get it to the laser writer. But we couldn't talk to other computers in the network or anything like that.

But yeah, it just, it was just a dream setup for me. And so all through undergrad, I would go in there, I'd write papers on it. I did, you know, I, I used Mac, right. If memory serves, I think Mac, right. Was the one I, I, I want to say that Mac word, the, the Microsoft word processor was also available. Yeah.

but I preferred Mac, right. It was simpler. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, and there were other apps I used on it too. I mean, there was a rudimentary spreadsheet we use all the time for kind of the work we did at college. And, and it just had the stuff we needed. And it was just such a weird time too. Cause like you, that was the computer you stood up, you walked out of the room and you didn't have a computer anymore. You know, also that was before email really for, for me at least. Um,

Um, so it was, it was a very isolated experience. You went, you did your, your work on it and then you left it there. Maybe, maybe that was better in a way. I don't know, but man, I love that computer. Do you own one now? I know. No. A couple of years ago, a, um, a listener sent me cause I also, my dream machine that I never had access to was a Mac SE. Yeah. Yeah.

And a listener sent me one. Like he had one in his garage he didn't want anymore. And when the kids were little, I actually had them use it for a while because I didn't want them on the internet.

And so we used it in the house for a while, but eventually I gave it away. I gave it to somebody else that wanted it on their shelf. So, yeah, I don't want a nostalgia computer. I don't understand. What does that mean? Yeah, I know. You know what I mean? That's where you and I, our paths diverge. I just...

I don't like to keep a lot of stuff, but it's all good in my memory. You know what I mean? If I had one, I don't think I'd really use it much. I had one here, and I barely used it. But it was just such a great computer to kind of show the way and also super useful to me. Like, I got a lot of work done on that thing. Yeah, no, it's cool. I mean, you came along, like, right at the turning point. I think that's really, really...

special and i mean how cool that you've recognized it right because a lot of people didn't you know a lot of people looked at the mac like that's a toy but you saw what it could be i think that's oh no that speaks a lot about who you are even when i was like a young lawyer and using a mac people would make fun of me when i'd go in like a courtroom they're like oh you brought your toy computer and then it's like oh wait a second wait till i get my keynote out and i you know

And then, then you're going to not going to think it's a toy anymore after I'm done with you. You know, but, but the, um, the, uh,

But yeah, the Macs, I always felt like Apple kind of had the right idea. And I could never understand why they weren't as successful as they were back in the day. But I wanted a laptop at the same time. And kind of the other piece of the setup for me was, because I had worked for RadioShack, I got a, I think it was called a WP2. It was a little keyboard in black plastic with an eight-line LCD screen on it. Mm-hmm.

And that's all it did was text. You could write text in it and you could see eight lines that ran on a couple AA batteries. And then you could hook it up serial to a Mac or a PC and dump the text file out of it. And so I got that in college so I could go in classes and take notes. And I used it all through law school, like all through law school, I had this. And like, there was a lot of wealthy people at my school and they all had like

That was when they had the eraser mouse was a new thing, you know, where they put the little nubbin like on your keyboard. They all had their IBM ThinkPads or whatever with that stuff. And I'd show up with my RadioShack AA battery powered keyboard and they'd all look at me funny. But it was great. I could make an outline. I could take notes with the professor said that I could dump it in to a real computer when I got home.

Um, so that was also a big part of my setup, but to me, the, um, the computer that showed me the way was a Mac plus in 1988. All right. Well, we're keeping this one short gang. It's a holiday week.

I'm still feeling nostalgia now for my old Mac. I bet you are too, Steven. Oh yeah. Yeah. But the, I hope you're all having a great holiday. Get some time with your family, take some time off, enjoy and love each other. And we'll see you next week on the Mac power users. Thank you. One password for all your support. If you are a member, stick around. We've got some more nostalgic discussion this time. We're going to be talking about some of our early creative projects. Otherwise we'll see you next week.