Translated material
30 years with "MAC"
“Nothing of the kind,” the guest laughed, “the creaces live with the“ Macintoshi ”while the rest cost the IBM.”
I sighed with relief, because, overtaking fashion, from the very beginning I got a computer “Mack”, which turned my life and improved it. There were a lot of people like me, judging by the enthusiastic excitement, with which these days the world celebrates the 30th birthday of “Mac” . To love a soulless car so, you need to doubt that it really does not have a soul. This happened to me in the already distant 1987, when I bought the first apparatus founded by Steve Jobs of the company.
Until then, I hardly managed to cope with any devices more difficult than an umbrella. The more horror was inspired by a head -shaped box with a window. Of course, there was an instruction in the box. She was not much thinner than the "war and peace." But after I found a socket, everything turned out to be simple, and after an hour I wrote on a computer, changing my friend's days of my harsh - writing typewriter.
I must say that the writers became the hottest fans of "apple" computers. They were not afraid of them - they were afraid to be left without them. In New York, there was even an ambulance on motorcycles, which for a clock repair computers for customers from a west end, densely populated by writers. Since then, the electronic fauna has become familiar, like light bulbs: we notice them when they burn out. But Macintosh managed to regain the computer again, releasing the first tablet. With suspicion, referring to any inedible new products, I did without ai-pod and ai-fofa, but the ai-Pad finished me off because I saw how Steve Jobs was selling it. He glowed with happiness, turning in his hands a machine and explaining her stature. It was not an advertisement, but a sermon, and I could not resist.
In the box that they put in the store was not enough for me.
“There is no need,” the girl answered my claim and was right.
Ai-Ped, a genius of simplicity, kindness and attachment, occupies an intermediate step between an animated and inanimate world. Like everything beloved, it is necessary and useless, because it does not replace an adult serious computer, in which I inject my life for hours. AI-PED is not for work, it is for enlightened leisure. I learned to read books on it, saving beams sagging from the severity of the library. I acquired a picture gallery, visited half the world, found out what I wanted, photographed, what I could, and used to do nothing without his advice.
Of course, all this can be achieved from a regular computer. But the trick of Macintosh products is that they turn the scientist into a toy of knowledge. She is a holiday that is always with you: under his side, pillow, under his arm, on the road, in bed, at the table. As if the legs had grown, or rather, wheels. Jobs himself said so: the computer should be a bicycle for intelligence. It is important that not a train, not a bus, not a truck, but a bicycle - an individual, like a toothbrush, transport that takes you more like a walk than to work.
The genius of “Macs” is that they selected a computer revolution from “physicists” to share its fruits with “lyrics”. And this is such hopeless humanities like me will never forget.
Alexander Genis is a New York writer and publicist, author and host of the American Hour program on top of the barriers
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