Happy Birthday Mac! Hard to believe that 30 years have gone by and the genius of the folks, headed by Steve Jobs, that resulted in a computer for the masses, has withstood the brutal technology landscape for so long. Many of the original ideas with respect to the interfaces still remain, giving a sense of familiarity that people crave for, while the underlying software has gone through enormous changes. The Macs, like all other computing devices, has gotten much faster and is able to do a lot more, but life’s simple pleasures such as ⌘Q still remain. I thoroughly miss Hypercard. I loved it and drove my officemate nuts by making Apple read the text in HyperCard, using MacinTalk, I think. Oh, those good old days!

I was listening to an NPR story on this today, I was amazed at the creativity of the group that designed the first Mac. “A self educated dropout, someone in the middle of an MD-Phd program,  musicians, an archaeologist, and an artist” who formed the initial team that designed the Mac. Of course, the result shows that this was indeed a brilliant idea. Leave it to the techies and you will get Alt-CTRL-Del!

I have been fortunate to have participated in the evolution of the Macs since its existence. Since I worked in computational chemistry, we had plenty of chances to dabble in new technologies. Initially we used it for writing papers, but soon it became evident that it had enough compute power and a version of Basic programming language that allowed us to visualize small molecules. Soon  after several programs emerged such as ChemDraw, that allowed you to draw and rotate small molecules with ease. This was extremely useful.

During early ’90s, a psychology professor and a colleague from Informational Technology Services began to work on “mapping the Wesleyan Curriculum” as a way to help students understand the course offerings at the University and most importantly, the relationships amongst the courses and possible pathways to majoring in various subjects. This was all done beautifully on a Mac using a suite of tools including Hypercard. Unfortunately, this could not move forward as is because of the “Mac-dependence”, and at that time, PC controlled a significant marketshare. It was also the time that Netscape was gaining a lot of popularity.

We took all the good work that went into WesMaps and implemented it for the web. It has gone through multiple iterations, but the essence of WesMaps, a searchable course catalog with some connectivity amongst classes shown through clusters, still ives. And it originated as a Mac application.

I defected from Macs to NeXT computers for a short period of time because in the mid 90’s Apple was poorly run and the rate of innovation was not the greatest. Apple was becoming yet another IBM like corporation and Steve Jobs moved on to create NeXT. It was a marvelous operating system and I loved the system. I had one with a giant 23″ screen running at home! Talk about creativity and simplicity! NeXTMail was the email interface and I distinctly remember a beautiful icon of Lips that represented “Lip service”. When you clicked on it, the system read the email back to you.

I did switch to being a Windows user for a short period of time, and then back to Macs. The journey has been memorable and I continue to marvel at the system and quality control. I rarely reboot my computer. It stays up for days. My average uptime  is like 62 days. Sometimes, I reluctantly agree for a reboot because some software still requires me to reboot after an installation. Its simplicity, consistency and brilliance continues.

I just made a short movie for a friend’s 60th birthday. The ease of use of tools such as iPhoto and iMovie are just unimaginable.

So, thank you Mac for making me happy! I wish you many more happy birthdays… Keep things simple and thanks for helping get “RTFM” out of our vocabulary! Instead, let us ask WTFM?