Many Pies

Many Pies

Monday, February 10, 2014

Happy (slightly belated) Birthday Mac!

My first encounter with the Apple Mac was on a project I worked on for what was then Powergen when I worked at Logica. The computers we were developing on were mini-computers, which were about the size of a two drawer filing cabinet. Well kids, I expect you find it strange to hear something so big described as a "mini" computer, but that shows how big the normal computers were. The Macs weren't up to running the software for managing electricity operations, but they were good at drawing the Yourdon diagrams we used to design the software. The software to do that was pretty good. One of my memories of those days was, following a project meal where a lot of alcohol was consumed, someone came in looking rather worse for wear. He took one of the Macs under his arm and headed home again, presumably to do some design diagrams in a darkened room. In time PCs replaced them as the tools for doing the graphical stuff we needed to do, but for a while they just fitted the job.

Stephen Fry has a really good blog post about the Mac, including a bit about something I wasn't aware of - when Steve Jobs nearly met Tim Berners-Lee, but not quite.



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