1984, the year of Big Brother, was 25 years ago. And on January 24,1984 Apple introduced the Apple Macintosh, the computer that changed everything.
At the time I was writing owners manuals – among other things – at the Los Angeles musical instrument company Oberheim Electronics. Oberheim was a hotbed of the latest technology, since we were creating state-of-the-art synthesizers for professional musicians, such as Van Halen, The Police and Chaka Khan.
Tom Oberheim picked up one of the original Macs, which made its way around the engineering team before it started collecting dust in the corner (didn’t take too long, the engineers didn’t see the Mac as much more than a cool expensive toy).
But I was charged with creating owners manuals for the keyboards and drum machines we were making, and my current creative setup was a word processor and a daisy-wheel printer (imagine a typewriter controlled by computer and you’ll be pretty close). Needless to say, this setup did not lend itself well to visual representations, which needed to be outsourced by hand and at enormous cost.
But the Mac was new, fun and slightly rebellious, as Apple designer Andy Herzfeld described it. And it did graphics, perfect to communicate to my non-reading musician audience how to use the box they just maxed out their credit card buying – our instruments were not cheap back in the day.
Enter MacPaint with its ONE BIT color graphics (you had two colors: White or Black) and fun-to-use tools that made for fun-looking graphics. The last piece of the puzzle was discovering a lab in San Francisco that would print out my MacPaint graphics files on pristine photo paper. And with that I was off and running! That Mac never left my desk ever again. And a Mac has been on my desk every day since.
Here are some graphics from the first manual I did with the Mac, for the Oberheim Xpander – itself a groundbreaking synthesizer.
What about Pagemaker you say? The program that started the desktop publishing revolution? This was before Pagemaker. Pagemaker and the Laserwriter came the following year. And that really changed everything.
