Why this Blog?
This will be a blog about:
- Apple products and news
- Productivity
- Life
I have benefited from and been interested in Apple products for the past 38 years, since my first Mac in 1984. I’ve been following and experimenting with productivity for about ten years, but only seriously so in the last 2 years. I’ve been interested in life for 69 years at this writing.
My reason for starting this blog is to make my unique contribution to the blogging communities that I have learned so much from in the past years. I’m the kind of person who enjoys learning about new things, simplifying and structuring them, then creating projects to communicate my learning to others. I do this by writing blogs, writing articles, or doing presentations at my local Mac/iOS club. In other words, I enjoy teaching.
One of the main things that originally attracted me to the Mac and still does is the beauty in the design of Macs and the operating system. I’ve had to use PCs extensively in the past years and in my opinion, there’s no comparison. Obviously designed by geeks with no sense of beauty or design. Even now, Windows looks like it’s 20 years behind MacOS.
Why “Original Mac Guy”?
Using a DOS PC
I used a PC running DOS to prepare a doctoral thesis prospectus in the summer of 1984. It took 10% of my time to write it, and 90% to figure out how to get the program to format my prospectus the way I needed it to be. It was green text on a dark background, and arcane codes were used before and after words, phrases, and paragraphs for all formatting.
It was horrible.
Hello, Mac!
In the fall of 1984, I went into a computer store in Minot ND and sat in front of a Mac. It was the first beautiful computer I had seen, a beige-colored plastic device with smooth lines and an artistic look about it. It had a small black-and-white screen built into it, a keyboard, and a mouse (first one of those I had ever seen, also)
Within minutes, without any instruction, I was writing and formatting text on the Mac word processing program called Write. Formatting was as easy as pointing to choices at the top of the program and selecting buttons and drop-down menus with a pointer controlled by a mouse. No more looking up formatting codes, no more guessing what the finished product would look like since it had WYSIWYG.
You need to understand that none of these features were available in consumer products before the Mac. It was a quantum leap in computing to use a mouse and a graphical user interface.
I immediately fell in love with the Mac and had to buy one. Fortunately, my new job in the Air Force gave me the income I needed to do so! I upgraded that Mac a number of times; to a 512K Mac when that came out, then later to a Mac Plus.
The Original Mac Guy
So, obviously, I’m calling this blog “Original Mac Guy” because I had an original Mac. My original Mac started a love affair with the Mac that has lasted many years, and the joy just keeps on coming with the ongoing transition to silicon-powered Macs. I’m writing this on a Mac PowerBook, M1 Pro. And looking forward to the larger iMac (maybe this summer?)!