Today the Macintosh is 25 years old. I’ve been in the game for 20 years. My Godmother, Aunt Josie, bought my first Mac in 1989. It cost a princely $5,000 and ran at 16 megahertz (the computer I am on now runs at more than 2,000 megahertz). Without sounding too melodramatic, this is the human gesture, and the creative tool that I credit with giving me a foothold in the world, which I further credit with saving my sanity in some very delicate years. I was able to stay busy and productive. Stories I wrote on that computer were published in perhaps 100 newspapers and magazines, from the Las Vegas Sun to the Huguenot-Herald of New Paltz to The New York Times.
Indeed, that Mac was immortalized in a column in the Times by Michael Winerip. “In 1989, as a graduate student here, he founded Student Leader News Service, covering the state and city university systems. It was really just Mr. Coppolino, a computer that his Aunt Josie bought him and three buddies who worked the phones in exchange for a place to sleep. They did good journalism. Mr. Coppolino was one of the few people not on the state payroll who understood the budget.”
I was just taking a shower trying to add up the different Macs that I’ve owned over the years. I remember them all. Let’s see, there was that original Mac II CX, which had a full color screen. There was a ridiculous Mac Classic without a hard drive. There were the two that the SUNY Binghamton Student Association gave me (both old Mac Plus computers, also lacking hard drives; I used a lot of externals back then). Allan Rousselle gave me an old 7200 that I started Planet Waves with. It was Allan, my assistant when I was editor of the campus weekly Generation at SUNY Buffalo, who announced to me one day years later, “You really need to be on the Internet.” Thank you Allan, for that and much besides.