Photographer James Ball (aka Docubyte) knows what a computer is. He’s spent part of career lovingly photographing the machines of yesteryear, from the giant mainframes of the ’50s and ’60s to the first wave of personal computers in the late ’70s and ’80s. When he saw Apple’s iPad pro advertisement that ended with a young girl asking “What’s a computer?” as she typed away on her tablet, it provoked him.
“I’m not some old technophobe, and I get the whole post-computing cloud/device blah blah thing,” Ball told Motherboard via email. “But I wanted to pick up an old Mac and say ‘Hey! Remember this? This is a computer. The era of crazy shaped beige boxes and clunky clicking keyboards, for me and a lot of other people, that is a computer.”
To honor those machines, Ball has created a series of high resolution animated gifs honoring 16 machines from the era of the birth of the personal computer. He calls the project ‘I Am a Computer: Icons of Beige.’
These are gorgeous.
That IPad ad makes me angry too, I am also a little upset that some of the hardware shown were just terminals not computers.
Meanwhile, no Altair, Sol-20 or other CPM machines. No Kim-1, Pet Transactor, Atari, Ti-99A, Timex Sinclair, Cosmac-Elf … all those machines and more are what started the home computer era.
To add to your list:
No Commodore PET, VIC20, C64 or any Amiga model
No Tandy TRS 80, Tandy 1000, or Color Computer
No Amstrad 6128
No BBC Micro
None of the RISC OS based machines
It’s more of a retrospective of business machines than personal computers.
Not even that. Just an Apple fan’s list of a few machines not Apple, plus the Apples.
And those prices, WOW! No wonder the home computer market took off with the ZX Spectrum and C64, etc. They was affordable. If I remember right my first computer which was a Sinclair ZX81 cost me about £100 in 1982 and included the 16k ram pack. Even big business would have balked at ten grand for one of those machines!
The author of the article is just as ignorant as the ad makers. The ad SHOULD end with the mom saying “What’s a computer?! That device you’re using – THAT is a computer, albeit one that has been artificially limited in what you can do to force you into buying applications rather than making applications yourself.”
You can make the applications yourself, you just need another machine to develop it on.
Long Live Hypercard!
I still don’t understand why Apple doesn’t make “Hypercard Swift Editionâ€. True, I’d like it to support Hypertalk and at least parts of Applescript as well, but.. Apple seems to think Swift is “where it’s atâ€. Would it be possible to make a “dynamic source converter†to allow someone to write (and edit) in either language, with appropriate extensions to Hypertalk to represent Swift idioms that don’t exist in HT 2.0?
How many “older Hypercard developers†(maybe age 35 and up?) who could be brought back if “programming [i, mac]OS with HyperTalk†were made “easy� Basically 100% source and editor compatibility?
Being a Commodore man I never used Hypercard, but our store sold Commodore, Apple, TI-99 and at the start CP/M machines.
I was always amazed by people who dropped into store or at the schools during a service call at the work being done with Hypercard.
People with little computer experience were making programs to teach, process data or just do presentations that would take me 2-10 times longer for me to write using standard programming tools in Assembly, Basic or C.
I wish school still used it.
I find the comment about the Apple II being the IBM PC’s only rival to be rather odd.
I still have a PCW magazine business computer buyer’s guide from shortly after the IBM PC’s release. The 5150 wasn’t treated as anything particularly special, just one of the dozens of options they discussed. In particular there were CP/M systems that were better reviewed, offering a higher spec for the same money.
In fact, one of their concerns about the IBM PC was the initial lack of MS DOS software. CP/M was the nearest thing to a standard and had a much larger software catalogue at the time. The domination of IBM’s PC was only a foregone conclusion in hindsight.
The have the Mac but not the Mac rivals and killers, nor the most popular computer of all time the C64.
Not a single Atari computer either.
To echo a lot of statements on here.
Where is all the computers that people actually used?
An ADM-3A, but no VT100, and no flippin’ TRS-80 Model I?!?
Pfui.
How did he manage to miss the Commodore Pet or the Amiga and the huge number of Europe and British Computers?
The BBC B Micro was outstanding.