Earlier this year, Christophe Laporte of the French-language publication MacGeneration asked if I might share a personal memory about Apple for a project they were working on for Apple’s 50th anniversary.
In honor of that anniversary today, I thought I’d share that memory here as well!
Every time I see the original bright six-color Apple logo, I’m reminded of the Apple ][ donated to our small school just before the end of the school year. I asked the librarian if I could borrow its stack of spiral-bound manuals over the summer. I pored through that stack of manuals as my family road-tripped from Seattle to South Dakota—my mind fully occupied by the information contained within, as my senses took in the feel of the paper and the smell of the books.
Even without the computer, I thought about what I could make that computer do when I got back, scribbling out BASIC programs in the back seat with pencil on paper.
I was entranced by the empowering possibilities of that early “bicycle for the mind”—a feeling that has never left me. When Macintosh was introduced as “the computer for the rest of us”—sporting its bright six-color Apple logo—what really caught my attention was the huge stack of Xeroxed “Inside Macintosh” developer manuals: kept in a three-ringed binder at the University’s computer center, filled with loads of Pascal APIs. And when Steve introduced the NeXT cube with its stack of API manuals, I was entranced. My life has revolved around the platform ever since.
The feeling and smell of HTML doesn’t quite compare to the feel and smell of those physical books. But I still think of those manuals whenever I see that bright six-color Apple logo.
