Category: Art

MacMemories From 1984

Timothy Price57 Comments

I’ve been cleaning out shelves in my office area and I came across the media packets that came with the first Macintosh we got in 1984 followed by the first Macintosh Plus we got in 1986. The Macintosh had 128K of RAM and one 3.5 inch diskette drive, no hard drive. The process for using it was 1) you booted the computer with the System diskette. 2) You ejected the system diskette and inserted the Program diskette and opened the program, such as MacPaint. 3) You MacPainted to create your graphics. 4) You selected Save to save your graphic file, which ejected the Program diskette. 5) You inserted a diskette to save your file. 6) If the diskette wasn’t formatted, then you would have to click on Yes to format the diskette, and 7) save your file.

I’m trying to remember if when you quit the Program and Shut Down the Macintosh if it asked you to put the Program diskette and then the System diskette back in before it shut down, or if it simply ejected whichever diskette was in the drive before it shut down. I think there was a lot of ejecting and inserting the different diskettes before it shutdown.

We got an external disk drive with the first Macintosh Plus, which meant we could have a program diskette in the computer and a file diskette in the external drive. Our next Macintosh plus had two disk drives. We got external hard drives for the Macintosh Pluses before the SEs and SE/30s came out with internal hard drives. When we got one Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Laserwrtier in 1986, the pair cost over $10,000 — around $3K for the Macintosh Plus and $7K for Laserwriter. That’s around $23,700 ($7.1K and $16.6K respectively) in 2020 dollars. Macintosh computers always came with the system software and at least a sample of programs.

Those were the really expensive, bad old days of computing. The first IBM PC we got, with similar specs (it had two 5.25″ floppy drives) was around $3K in 1981 (~$8,600 today) plus you had to buy whichever DOS you wanted to use, plus buy the programs, the drivers, etc. Nowadays you can easily pay $7,000 or $24,000 or more for a new Macintosh Pro. However, you get a lot of CPUs, RAM, and disk space for the money and a lot of powerful programs included in the price. But most computers today cost a fraction of what they did in the bad old days of computing.

 

Face Trees

Timothy Price30 Comments

I washed our 16-inch cast-iron skillet and set it on the stove to dry it off before I oiled it. The water made trees and a face. When I started drying it, I noticed there was still a little food stuck to the skillet, so I washed it again. The second time I set in on the stove it only made trees.

Cien Años…

Timothy Price29 Comments
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Lois: Live to be 100… It’s worth it! Work at it!

We celebrated our good friend Lois Brandt’s 100th birthday today. I can’t think of a better way to end the first decade of the 21st Century than celebrating a century of life with good friends. Happy Birthday, Lois!

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Lois’ brother Art and daughter Susan.
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Art

But Is It Still Art?

Timothy Price21 Comments

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The Haphazard Homemaker’s post 10 Minute Picture Frame Wreath reminded me of my first post But Is It Art? that I had done when I first started this art piece in 2014 with two compnents: the print of the spreadsheet and the dollar bill donated by Sean, a computer wizard who owns EDI Systems. Staff and clients have contributed found objects to the piece since then. I added the frame around October or November of 2014, along with a couple of mummified cockroaches from my Cucaracha Crunch Coffee, and Cucaracha Crunch Blonde Coffee.

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A closer view of the original components of the piece with one mummified blonde cockroach still hanging on the edge of the dollar bill five years later.

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The wider scene of the wall the piece hangs on in my office includes a painting from Brazil a former staff member gave me, our UNM Lobo mascots collection (Lobo Lucie and Lobo Louie), a 1959 Ford Fairlane hood ornament another former staff member gave me, various vintage zip drives, and a framed guitar pick I extracted from the DVD drive that was in yet another former staff member’s laptop. I had to completely disassemble her laptop to get to the DVD drive to extract the pick. It was a very involved process. When I asked how the pick got in the drive, all she said was “Boonesfarm Strawberry Hill wine was involved!”