Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. The user experience of most pre-Mac computers was "black screen with glowing green bracket". If you typed something, the computer would respond "SYNTAX ERROR", which was even more intimidating. You in your ignorance had committed not just an error, but a
syntax error, whatever that was.
Seeing a Mac for the first time, from the smiling icon at bootup to the way the pointer moved over things, and the way you could click to make things appear on the screen, was a transformative moment similar to the first time people a generation later encountered an image-capable web browser. It was one of those moments (like seeing VisiCalc in action) that made large numbers of people realize that a world was coming when computers might be usable by, and useful to, regular mortals.
I was nine years old when I saw my first Mac in 1984, and my only previous experience with computers was teaching an IBM PC to print 'BUTT' in an infinite loop using BASIC. I'd love to hear the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI.
Seeing a Mac for the first time, from the smiling icon at bootup to the way the pointer moved over things, and the way you could click to make things appear on the screen, was a transformative moment similar to the first time people a generation later encountered an image-capable web browser. It was one of those moments (like seeing VisiCalc in action) that made large numbers of people realize that a world was coming when computers might be usable by, and useful to, regular mortals.
I was nine years old when I saw my first Mac in 1984, and my only previous experience with computers was teaching an IBM PC to print 'BUTT' in an infinite loop using BASIC. I'd love to hear the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI.