Posted Monday, June 14, 2004

My Office, Circa 1984

Today: a blast from the past.

I've been slowly but surely scanning thousands of old negatives and slides using a Minolta film scanner. I wrote about this subject in a recent Macworld, and I expand on the topic in the latest edition of my book.

I recently scanned the following photo, which shows my home office in early 1984.



On the left is, of course, a 128K Mac; an ImageWriter printer is on the far left. My external floppy drive hadn't arrived yet.

On the right is some bizarre Texas Instruments MS-DOS computer that had a built-in voice-recognition system. You had to wear a headphone-type mike and spend hours training the computer, and it still didn't work. I was reviewing it at the time. (In early 1984, I was senior technical editor of Kilobaud, one of the first computer magazines.) If memory serves, I panned it.

In August 1984, Kilobaud (then renamed Microcomputing) folded, and I began freelancing and writing for Macworld.

And at the risk of sounding like the old fogey that I suppose I am, that pretty much takes us up to the present.