I was surfing around looking for something for a film review I’m working on for FlickFilosopher.com, and I came across Mike Godwin’s blog -- he’s the former lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for whom, as you may already know, Godwin’s Law is named. But anyway, this isn’t about Godwin’s Law the law (which has to do with how likely it is for someone to invoke Nazism and Hitler in an online discussion -- see Wikipedia for a complete rundown and analysis of the law) but Godwin’s Law the blog.
Here I am, madly in love with my new iBook with its 1.5GB of RAM and 1.4 GHz processor and its large (for a laptop) millions-of-colors screen and especially with OS X, with its floaty 3-D windows and buttons and drag bars with their metallic sheen and it’s all just so luscious and intuitive... and here’s Godwin’s blog:
There’s something really deep-down hilarious about this, and I laughed out loud, probably because I never thought I’d actually find myself nostalgic for my first Mac, a Classic II. I can’t say I miss it, but I do remember that bringing that puppy home (this would have been early 1992, I think) was like, well, bringing a puppy home.
But the weird thing is, the design of Godwin’s blog sent me back even further, to my old Commodore 64 and its GEOS operating system, which was a blatant ripoff of the Mac OS...
...but it was the first time I’d used a graphical user interface, and it blew my mind. And the reminder sent me on a little surfing expedition, where I found such cool stuff as:
• a history of GEOS
• the Wikipedia entry for GEOS
• the beautiful GUIdebook: Graphical User Interfact Gallery and its collection of GEOS screenshots
My old Commodore is still sitting in my parents’ attic, and everyone once in a while my mom asks if I want it. I don’t -- I’m not a computer hobbyist, and as much as I have adored every computer I’ve ever had, I adore them as tools, for what they can do, for what I can do with them. Once they’re no longer useful as tools, my love affair with them ends and I move on to a new romance. Maybe I’m fickle -- I’m now on my fifth Mac in 14 years (not counting the Powerbook 100 I bought on the cheap and never used -- it was cheap because it was frustratingly obsolete). But it’s nice to be reminded of how great it was to feel so free and empowered by a tool, and much fun it is to discover what each new tool can do.
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