Maunday Monday Mac Musings

Maunday!

Only because I wish I were in Maunday’s Bay, Anguilla! (A tiny place etween the Virgin Islands and St. Martins, East of Jamaica) At least there would be surf and a beach! It’s cloudy and cold here. The weather where I live is in mourning for the East Coast, and all our mymac friends who are unlucky enough to live back there right now.

But, today is also Monday, and these are MAC (MINI) MUSINGS!

Here is fairly good, first examination of a real, hands-on Mac mini. The link is HERE .

Of course, I am giving you this link through gritted teeth, because MY Mac mini is BACK ORDERED! And I could not get my hands on one over the weekend, to REVIEW IT for you FIRST! (Grrr!)

THE ROOTS OF THE MINI

Also, to compare the new Mac mini, with the very first Macintosh, released on this date, 21 years ago, GO HERE This is a QUICKTIME file, a 22MB, twenty year old movie of Steve Jobs (in a bowtie!), looking strangely like Noah Wyle, introducing the very first Macintosh.

(Snyopsis of video)
~ Steve Jobs, in 1984, speaking in front of an large audience, black suit (before his jeans-and-turtleneck days)
~ He says, “All of the images you about to see on the large screen will be generated by what’s in that bag.”
~ He lifts the black bag to reveal a Mac on a table
~ (applause)
~ He inserts a diskette into the Mac and steps back
~ The word MACINTOSH gracefully scrolls across the screen to the music of “Chariots of Fire”
~ (wild applause)
~ Screen shots appear of the MacPaint program, AppleWorks, a calculator, Adobe fonts, TeachText editor, and a 3d chess game
~ (cheering, applause)
~ Steve introduces Macintosh speaking for itself. A voice, sounding like Stephen Hawking, reads a few paragraphs of text on the screen
~ (applause, cheering)
~ (wide shot of audience applauding)
~ (end)

My, we have come a long way since then, haven’t we? Back then, the original Macintosh was a marvel, considering it came in the midst of DOS PCs and CP/M computers, and the Apple II.

“The Mac truly was revolutionary. Up until that time applications had GUIs but not the entire user interface for the OS and audio had been rudimentary. seeing a Mac in action had the audience completely mesmerized as people realized that the machines that they currently possessed had just become obsolete.” (Poster at Slashdot.org)

“From a historical perspective this event was so much more then just another tech demo. This was watching the world of computing turn upside-down in a matter of minutes and the people in the audience knew it. Although not often attributed, the 1984 release of the Macintosh was the genesis that brought about practically all of modern computing. This was big. Jobs knew it, you could see it on his face. Call me sentimental but, that was the face of a man who knew he had just changed the world.” (poster at Slashdot.org)

Andy Hertzfield said that the stuff was actually done on that little Macintosh for that first presentation, except for the theme music from “Chariots of Fire.” However, the software team cheated a little by using a Mac with 256K of RAM instead of the stock 128K.

HERE is an excellent link to the first history of the Macintosh, for all you who are sentimental or just curious. (You might want to bookmark this one)

AS FOR THE MAC MINI

Awesome little computer, no? Hard to believe computing has so advanced after twenty-one years.

There are a number of great articles talking about the mini, besides here at MyMac.com.

HERE is yet another particularly good link to Technology Review, explaining some of the possible uses people will put their new Mac minis to. I can think of a few more. Can you?

Overnight, there have been a hundred or more Mac mini websites appearing on the World Wide Web. A few of them look pretty good. (How DO they get all that graphics and coding up so fast?) Time will tell which of them will endure and be useful, and which of them will disappear overnight. We mentioned a few of them in our Monday Meanderings last week.

Of course, you can always count on the best and leading edge thought and most factual and up-to-date information right here, at MyMac.com.

Still can’t wait to get my own MAC mini. Stay tuned!

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