BazzaRama

It’s has been almost six years since I started this series, so I thought it was about time I picked it up again.

When I left off at the end of part one, I had purchased a Macintosh SE for home. That Mac became a focal point for my spare time. I was using the almost identical Mac model in my job as a production artist but I wanted to learn much more than I could on the job. So I spent many hours in the evenings and on weekends reading manuals and magazines as well as using the Mac for personal uses both productive (word processing, accounting, and graphics) and entertaining (games). I dove into the computer settings, learned how to edit resource forks to customize the interface, and enjoyed many hours putting my art skills into expression on this new digital media device.

I used this Mac from 1987 until the spring of 1996 when I sold it to a non-profit after purchasing my second Mac, a PowerBook 190cs. In those nine years I used the heck out of that SE. I added external storage, an external 40 megabyte hard drive (what was I going to do with all that space?). I purchased a scanning gizmo that attached to the Apple ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer so I could scan black line art images into the computer (man, was it slow). I joined the local user group, PMUG (the Portland Macintosh Users Group), and began volunteering in that group. I submitted a few digital illustrations for the cover art of their monthly journal, MouseTracks. I learned QuarkXPress and joined the journal team at PMUG, eventually becoming the layout artist for the publication. I taught an introductory class on computer graphics for PMUG members. I attended the monthly meetings where software publishers and tech notables came to speak and demonstrate. We had the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Apple Evangelist, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, just to drop a couple of names. I was recruited to teach “Introduction to Macintosh” classes at Mt. Hood Community College. It was a intense and busy time of learning and community building. It’s amazing that my wife put up with all of it.

All the while, Apple as a company was flailing and on the bring of bankruptcy. But I was working in graphic design. Desktop publishing rocketed into prominence in the printing industry and may have saved Apple from an earlier demise. I had changed jobs three times in those nine years. From a production artist at a decal printing company, to a temp worker and self-employed graphic artist, to a graphic designer and layout artist in the marketing department of a medical equipment and ambulance company, to the studio assistant at a pottery studio supporting a spirituality center (my life as a ceramic artist is the topic for another blog post). I used a number of different Mac models for those various employers, but my trusty Macintosh SE kept going strong at home.

The impetus for moving to a new Mac, specifically a laptop (or notebook, the term Apple used at the time), was the planning for an extended overseas adventure for me and my wife. Even though the SE was “luggable,” it wasn’t a computer that could fit in a backpack and be taken on planes, trains, and automobiles whilst traveling around the globe. We planned on using the PowerBook for documenting our trip in writing. This was obviously before digital photography, so we also took a small, point ’n’ shoot 35mm camera to capture images and a micro cassett audio recorder to capture sounds and audio commentary as we traveled. If only we had iPhones and iPads back then.

The PowerBook 190c served us well for that trip around the world and for several years after. When we arrived back in the States we decided to move from Portland, Oregon to Arizona. The Internet, email, and the world-wide web became part of our daily lives (albeit over an agonizingly slow dialup connection until the 2000s).

Steve Jobs returned to Apple with the NeXT team in 1997 and things turned around for the company. The iMac was introduced in 1998. My next Mac would be an iMac DV+ (sage green), which came out in the summer of 2000. My original Macintosh SE had left my life but I kept the PowerBook and have it still (it’s in my office closet). A couple of other Macs came into my life as a result of gifts or trades. There is a Power Macintosh 7600/120 complete with a 17-inch CRT monitor. My wife’s uncle gifted me with his PowerBook Duo when he upgraded to a new Mac. They are also here in my office but they are not “my” Macs and were never machines that I used regularly.

The iMac DV+ was the household Mac for about four years. In the next part of “My Mac Story,” I’ll recap those years and move on to the Macs that followed.