52(!): A bicycle for the mind

My technicolor Mac

I was home for the summer before my junior year of college when Apple released their all-in-one Macintosh 512Ke computer. I bought one and I loved it so; it cemented my life long love affair with computers.

The Mac 512Ke¹ was Apples cheaper version of the Mac+ that released a few months earlier. I was visiting one of my friends at UCLA when I saw it on sale at the student store. It cost $2,000 - that’s $5,000 in today’s dollars - I emptied my savings account to buy it.²

Personal Computers at that time were ugly. U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi ugly. Pasty putty-colored keyboards, boxy steel machined cases and big square recessed plastic CRT monitors. No mouse.

The computer software or operating system was UGLY to match. PCs ran Microsoft’s Disk Operating System or DOS where you typed cryptic commands into a flashing cursor. No color screens, fancier PCs had amber or green text instead of white on black.

Soul-less machines.

Photo by Yuheng Ouyang on Unsplash

The Mac on the other hand - oh la la. It was gorgeous. A small screen integrated into a curvy molded plastic case created a single unit with a grip handle built into the back, making it not really portable but at least luggable. The keyboard fit into an inset in the bottom of the computer and it had a mouse! The operating system matched in simplicity and innovation. No command line, it had a full desktop Graphical User Interface³. Microsoft’s first version of Windows wouldn’t come out until 6 years later.

That Mac was my trusty sidekick for the next 5 years. I bought a burgundy carrying case to keep it it safe through trips from Berkeley to LA and then from LA to Seattle for Grad school. I hinted of its beauty and grace in one of my first articles Will Andrew Break it??

The summer of my senior year at Cal, I got a job as an IT tech at Nestle. I worked in a big corporate tower out in Glendale, running around fixing and upgrading ugly IBM PCs.⁴

One of my fellow IT techs was in design school and we got the brilliant idea to splatter paint my Mac. We painted the computer my favorite color green, the keyboard blue and the mouse burgundy. If it was beautiful before, it was amazing now. 10 years later Apple released the iMac in a dozen different colors - the first PCs that weren’t beige. Steve Jobs should’ve hired us.

I expanded the Mac to get me through grad school, quintupling the memory from 512K to 2.5Mb and adding a hard drive with an after-market disk kit⁵ and a 20MB⁶ hard drive to keep all my stuff.

Here I am proudly posing with my AI girlfriend in grad school.

Here comes Godzilla! Apple put lots of easter eggs into the OG Mac. For example if you take the back off you'll find all the names of the engineers and designers engraved in the back. Here’s another⁷:

Yep, Steve is Steve Jobs. Steve called the computer a bicycle for the mind.

Watch this video, it's 1 minute:

Bicycle of the Mind

If you don’t watch it, here’s what Steve says:

I remember reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor came in at the top of the list, surpassing everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages. And we’ve come only a very short distance. And it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years.

That was 34 years ago!

What do you think is next? OpenAI’s first LLM GPT-1 came out 6 years ago. In a couple of years AI will be dramatically improved and different, and I’m not talking about Apple Intelligence⁸

Is AI the wave that will change everything or will it be something else?

best, Andrew

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Last week I wrote up some advice for people that don’t want to hear it but at least my buckle masterpiece got published

1. e stood for Enhanced to position it above the 512K Mac as a lower cost version of the Mac+ that had 1Mb of memory. The 512Ke had the same 128K ROM as the Mac+ and the higher density floppy drive. You could also expand the memory and add a hard drive. I know, I did both.

2. The prior year I’d taken 6 months off from Cal to regroup from a rough semester. I moved back in with my parents and I worked two jobs and that’s how I had saved some money. At night I waited tables at Swensen’s Ice Cream Parlor in Westwood and during the day I worked as a stock boy at a computer store. I loved making the sundaes and it was right down the street from UCLA so always hopping. The Computer store was fun because I got to setup all the new PCs and play with them. The one I remember most was another luggable, this one from Compaq that was an all in-one shaped like a big suitcase where the keyboard latched onto the front. It came with either amber or green text.

3. The origins of the GUI/the desktop interface and the Mouse trace back to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The traditional story is that Steve Jobs saw it and used it for the Mac and subsequently Bill Gates stole it. The real story is they both saw it and made hires from Xerox PARC and Steve beat Bill to the market by 6 years. The one thing not disputed is that neither company came up with it but rather it was one of many amazing innovations that came out of Xerox PARC.

4. IBM had come` out with a proprietary PC architecture to try and stem the onslaught of PC clones and Nestle had bought a bunch. I spent a lot of time under desks upgrading the memory in those. It was a pretty awesome job though. Nestle had just bought Carnation the ice cream company and they had a free cafe for employees with ice cream and other yummy food Nestle made.

5. The kit used a battery panel on the back to add a SCSI port which you could hook up to a standard hard drive. I got a 20Mb drive that was the same footprint as the Mac so it stood up a little higher like you can see in the last picture. Didn’t paint that.

6. Like last week’s second graders I now know you don’t care about this but I do. So… 20MB is a fraction - way less than 1% - of the 256GB I have on my current iPhone. But 20MB was enough to store 25 floppy disks worth of data that was accessible without shuffling floppy disks around so at the time it was a game changer.

7. The screen’s not broke - the refresh interval on older CRTs is slower than the shutter speed of my iPhone so pictures catch the screen repainting. The only thing that doesn’t work is the motor to eject the floppy disk so I need to stick a paper clip in that little hole to swap disks. Someday I’ll write a story on ASMR and I mean to do a video of this little guy in action. The Finder is Apple’s file manager. All Operating Systems of that era (and still) were built to manage local files and disks. Someday, there will be a new OS model for PCs that isn’t file centric because files are really secondary now. I expect future PC (and mobile) operating systems will evolve around AI innovations.

8. If you missed it, Apple announced a slew of AI features in their products they branded broadly ‘Apple Intelligence.’ That’s quite a thing - putting their brand on the line while trying to distance themselves from some of the disappointing AI hype.