mac.column.ted: The Macintosh: Changing our lives every day for 25 years

Ted Landau

January 2009

There's a lot going on this week. Amidst the celebration of the Obama Inauguration, let's not forget that this week is also the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh. For me, this occasion offers a time for reflection. I am one of those people who purchased an original Macintosh on the day it came out (actually, I bought it a couple of days later, but it sounds so much more impressive to say it was the same day).

I had to wait about 3 months before the Mac actually arrived (from today's instant-everything perspective, it's hard to believe that anyone would put up with such a lengthy delay). That was plenty of time for me to speculate on how much the Mac might change my life. I expected a great deal from this new computer. But I had no idea how much even my wildest expectations would turn out to be underestimates. Over the course of 25 years, the Mac has changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined.

I'm not talking about over-arching life changes here (such as the fact that the Mac is now the basis of my entire career). I am talking about innovations that have altered the day-in day-out daily routine of my life. The effect of these "smaller" changes reaches beyond the Mac. They ultimately put their stamp on anyone and everyone who has ever used -- and continues to use -- a computer.

So, to celebrate the Mac's big anniversary, I have assembled a Top 10 List: The Top Ten Ways That The Mac Has Changed Our Everyday Lives. One caveat: A couple of the items on the list are not specific to the Mac. They apply to any computer (even ones that run Windows!). So the list is a bit a cheat in this regard. Still, with Apple's pioneering work in graphical user interfaces and its leading role in the use of multimedia on computers, the Mac has played a critical, if not unique, role in all of these areas.

Finally, neither the original 1984 Mac nor any subsequent Mac model is included on this list. Rather, the Mac hovers over all the items on the list.

So, without further ado, here's the list. Ready? Drum roll please...

10. Desktop publishing
The advent of desktop publishing did more than save the Mac's bacon back in 1985 and transform the entire publishing industry. It changed the way everyday people create almost any document more involved than straight text. From party invitations to MUG newsletters to flyers announcing a garage sale, applications from PageMaker to Pages have made it nearly effortless to create professional-looking documents that might otherwise have taken days of work and thousands of dollars -- assuming you bothered to do it at all.

Desktop publishing is no longer unique to the Mac. But Adobe's Mac-only software together with Apple's LaserWriter printer were the original combo that started the ball rolling.

9. Digital photography
There was a time when you had to purchase rolls of film for your camera. You had to decide the ASA speed for each roll you bought. You had to send the film out to be developed. You had to deal with negatives and improperly developed prints. Plus, if you wanted to edit a photograph in any significant way, you first needed to take some classes in photography -- and set up your own darkroom. It was all very time consuming and expensive. And what about those times when the film got jammed in the camera, or you forgot to put a new roll in -- and you never even got the pictures you thought you were taking? Whew! Today, my digital camera can take over 1000 pictures on one SD card -- at virtually no cost.

And editing the results is as easy as opening iPhoto or, if I really want to get fancy, Photoshop Elements. Don't forget that the king of all photo-editing software, Photoshop, was originally a Mac-only product.

As for showing off my photos, I don't need to carry them in my wallet anymore, or paste them into a photo album or bring out the projector to show vacation slides. Instead, it can all be digital -- from storing photos on my iPhone to posting them on the Web to a slideshow in iPhoto.

The world of personal photography has changed so much in the past 25 years that it would be unrecognizable to a Rip Van Winkle just waking up after a long sleep. The Mac has played, and continues to play, a significant role in this revolution.

8. iPod and MP3 files
There was a time when I listened to music on cassettes and CDs. With time and effort, I could make my own discs, but I still had hundreds of discs to sort through, swapping them in and out of my CD player to listen to them, awkwardly skipping around to find the track I wanted. It was even worse when I had to deal with cassettes. Anyway, if you're over 25, I don't need to tell you this; you remember it too.

The iPod, together with the arrival of MP3 files, changed everything. Along the way, it changed the entire music industry. The iTunes Store is now the #1 music retailer in the United States. CD sales are in a death spiral from which they will never recover. The way we acquire and listen to music today is a world apart from a generation ago.

7. Mac OS X
When Mac OS X first came out, there was a bit of head-scratching. A UNIX core? Terminal commands? Thousands of System files, most of them invisible in the Finder? What happened to the simplicity of the original Mac OS? What happened was, it got replaced by a new OS that came to define rock-solid stability combined with an eye-popping graphical user interface. I would never want to go back. As Apple's "I'm a Mac" ad campaign continues to hammer home, compared to Windows, Mac OS X has much fewer crashes, almost no hassles with viruses, and is generally easier to use. Ultimately, Mac OS X helped save the Mac. Mac OS X remains the cornerstone of all of Mac computing today. I dread to think where we would be today if Apple were still trying to patch the Classic OS. Even worse, imagine if Apple had died altogether, and all that was left was Windows Vista. Talk about what would have been a change in my daily routine -- for the worse!

6. AirPort
Every time I use Wi-Fi to get online with my MacBook Pro or my iPhone, every time I use my Apple TV, almost every time I am online anywhere -- I am working with a technology that pretty much got its consumer-level start with Apple's original AirPort Base Station. I was blown away when I first set one up, and it remains just as impressive today.

5. Broadband
Being wirelessly connected to the Internet wouldn't be nearly as marvelous without broadband. Indeed, even wired connections benefit from broadband. Compared to dial-up modems, broadband is like going from a bicycle to a race car. Not only is it faster, but broadband has qualitatively changed what we do online. With broadband, you are automatically online 24/7. You don't need to tie-up a phone line. You don't have to wait several minutes for a connection to be established -- and hope you are not bumped off before you even get the chance to check your email. Without broadband, there would be no YouTube, no MobileMe photo albums, no QuickTime movie trailers, no (fill in the blank with just about anything you do with your Web browser).

As for getting work done, suffice it to say that I could no longer get through a normal day without access to broadband. Without it, it would take several days to accomplish what I now do in just a couple of hours.

Broadband is not a Mac-specific innovation. But the Mac was certainly at the forefront of the push to adopt broadband.

4. iPhone
After the Mac, I didn't think Apple would ever produce another product that would so greatly change my life. I was wrong. The iPhone has become so interwoven with my daily routines that I've almost forgotten what it was like to be without one. And make no mistake: as it runs a version of Mac OS X, the iPhone is ultimately a Mac. Someday, I expect the iPhone will replace notebook Macs for most users. It's already well on its way to doing this.

From the mundane tasks of checking the weather or getting movie times, to using Maps for more different tasks than I can count, the iPhone spends more time out of my pocket than in it. When I'm away from my desktop Mac, I use the iPhone to check email and Twitter -- or go to Amazon.com to compare the price of some product. Of course, the iPhone also doubles (or should that be triples?) as an iPod. Did I mention that you can play games on an iPhone? Lots of them. For hours at a time. Oh yes, I almost forgot: I use the iPhone to make phone calls.

3. MacPaint and MacWrite
Back in 1984, the original Mac's mouse, bitmapped screen and Finder were all impressive -- and have had an enduring effect on all computers in use today. Windows would not exist if Apple had not provided a Mac OS for Microsoft to copy. Still, whenever I had a chance to show off the Mac, my first demos were text manipulation in MacWrite and drawing in MacPaint. These two applications, which shipped with the original Mac (together with the entire OS, all on one 400K floppy disk!) just about define the term "game-changer."

With MacWrite, you could change fonts and actually see the change displayed on the screen. You could cut and paste without having to memorize a series of esoteric commands. There was true WYSIWYG (a term that, as I recall, didn't even exist before the Mac). It may sound all ho-hum now, but it was truly jaw-dropping back in 1984. No other computer could do anything like it. And it forever changed the way we write. I can't even imagine writing this article if I still had to depend on a typewriter and white-out.

As for MacPaint, the ability to draw objects, from filled circles to chalk-like lines -- by just dragging and clicking a mouse -- far exceeded any other software around at the time. People not only dropped the jaws but fell out of their chairs after seeing MacPaint. It is the grandfather of virtually all art and graphics software.

2. Email
There was a time when the main reason you bought a computer was for word processing or spreadsheets or some other productivity application. Not any more. Today, the main reason most people buy a computer is to get on the Internet. And a big reason they want to be online is to send and receive email. Email has completely changed how people communicate with each other. What used to require writing a letter and waiting days for it to be delivered, or making a phone call and hoping that the person was home, can now be done in seconds via email.

Plus, you can send entire documents or photos as attachments to an email. And you can send a message simultaneously to a dozen of your friends. Indeed, email is the parent of all social-networking today, from Facebook to Twitter. True, it has also given us spam, but let's not dwell on that.

Again, email did not originate on the Mac. But email client software, from the early days of Claris Emailer and Eudora to today's Mail and Entourage, certainly got a major push from the Mac.

1. World Wide Web
This was the easiest choice to make. I knew the Web would be #1on the list before I even started thinking about #2 through #10. Some may argue that the Internet itself should occupy the top spot, as the Web is a subset of the Internet. I disagree. I contend that the Internet would not be nearly as prevalent today without the World Wide Web. Indeed, I consider the Web to be one of the most significant inventions in recent human history.

And it isn't exactly Tim Berners-Lee original Web concept that I am talking about here. The revolution really began with the first graphical Web browser: Mosaic, later called Netscape. And while not a Mac-specific product, I believe Netscape's conceptual development owes a good deal to the graphical-user interface and page-layout software first popularized on the Mac. Certainly Mac users were among the leaders in early adoption of graphical Web browsers.

Regardless, it would be impossible to overstate the importance of the Web in our daily life. It's changed how we buy and sell anything, how we search for information, how we communicate over social networks, how we look for a job, how we keep up with news, how we create our own news (via blogs, YouTube videos and even MacFixIt), and how we (not me, but some other people) access pornography.

I am fond of saying that "the Web is everything." Don't believe me? Try this experiment: Every time you launch your Web browser, stop and think about how you would have accomplished the same task before the Web existed. Jot it down. At the end of a week, look over your list. You'll see what I mean.

Along the way, the Web has transformed (sometimes negatively) a host of other industries -- from newspapers to bookstores to television.

So there you have it. Twenty-five years of the Mac in particular, and computers in general, changing our lives every day.

[Note: From the original Mac to the iPod to the iPhone, Steve Jobs played a significant role in the realization of many of the items on this list. As I am sure you know, Mr. Jobs is currently on a six-month medical leave of absence. I want to offer my best wishes for his full and speedy recovery, and look forward to Steve's return this summer.]

To get my latest book, Take Control of Your iPhone, click the link. To send me an email, click here. You can also follow me on Twitter @tedlandau.

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