Computing: Home Era
Christmas 1994. Grandma Wardâs house. A huge box with a Sears computer bundle inside showed up next to the tree early Christmas Morning. I knew it hadnât come in the car with us so it must be for my cousins? But no, this Performa 6115CD and StyleWriter II (and Global Village 14.4 modem!) was ours, and a Core Memory was unlocked.
This is probably my densest and longest era, because I had so much much free time as a tween/teen. It is also in some ways my least documented. I still have archives of many of my files, transferred over the years from Mac to Mac. I could spend a very long time curating a few of those! Maybe a retirement project. đ Sadly there are basically no photos of me, well, computing. Film was still a precious commodity!
Having Macs both at home and at school (and for my dad, at work) really changed things. We now had compatible files, 3.5âł đŸ, and more. For 6th grade Spanish we had to draw our âdream houseâ and label all the rooms; I of course used a ClarisWorks Drawing document to create blueprints for several basement levels with secret passages, a movie theater, and a submarine pen.
MacAddict
We started to get online, first with eWorld (bundled with the computer), then AOL, then a full dial-up ISP called ISD (whose three-letter domain now seems to be in escrow). I also tried out some BBSes using the ClarisWorks Communication tool, but never really got into that scene. The Internet, and more specifically the Web, arrived for me a little bit later.
Pretty soon after getting this machine I used my allowance to subscribe to MacAddict Magazine, which really helped forge me into an Apple fan. Those included discs came with a ton of cool demos, some of which drove me to buy some software, or at least wish for it. I also loved paging through the old MacWarehouse catalog. I bought basic 3D home modeling software to make fun floor plans (I was always interested in architecture) which I also used for some school projects.
MacAddict was where I found out about OpenDoc and tried using CyberDog as my web browser briefly. All those embeds may have been a dead end but it feels like theyâve kinda be realized by modern web technologies. I was really following along with all of Appleâs weird â90s experiments back then.
Gaming
Much of my game playing in this era was built around pseudo-educational games like Civilization II and Dr. Brain and of course the Many Maxis games, but most especially SimFarm, SimTower, and of course, SimCity 2000. I still have many of my original save files and they run fine under emulation. At some point we upgraded from 8 MB to 24 MB of RAM. I remember trying to arrange direct dial games of Command & Conquer with friends, as well as a lot of Myst, among others. (Continuing a trend, after playing Riven, I was briefly really into Dâni.)
I especially got into the shareware offerings, mostly Atari clones, from Ambrosia Software. I didnât just play these games; I also was modifying and making my own plugins for the Escape Velocity games using ResEdit (sadly most of my work was lost to a resourceforkpocalypse migrating files at some point). Definitely some Star Trek/Star Wars visual inspiration. I donât remember what 3D tool I used, but it wasnât Bryce 3D. (The incantation to get these files into portable form was sips --format jpeg ship.pict --out ship.jpg).
TalonOspreyMakoFalconBarracuda
Of course this was also a time where it seemed like niche shareware was about the only thing you could play on the Mac, or youâd be waiting for some MacPlay port for years, with a few exceptions. A Windows-using classmate would jokingly ask me when Reader Rabbit 6 was coming out. In some ways it was a tough time to become a MacAddict, as Jason and Myke noted on a recent Upgrade⊠at least we had Marathon?
This was when I got a Zip drive as a Christmas gift from my Mac-loving uncle Mike (I remember seeing his early PowerBook and being amazed). If youâve followed me for a while youâve probably seen my photographed excitement? This drive enabled even faster data exchange with school (which, with faster than dialup speeds I often used to FTP download new software) and bringing larger multimedia documents back and forth. (It may have also been used to share larger applications with friends).
The Web
Sometime around 1996 I picked UltraNurd as both my Yahoo! Games profile and my AIM username. (I donât recall for sure which one came first.) Iâm sure I was kinda unsafe posting a/s/l in too many places. The name has obviously stuck, especially once I committed to it for my personal domain. Itâs not entirely accurate but it still makes for an interesting conversation when I have to give someone my email. While I know I used Gopher a few times at school my first regular web use would have been Netscape Navigator. (Or maybe even Communicator?)
I remember using Fetch (wild this is still actively developed on macOS) on faster school connection to FTP some SITs and SEAs that I then brought home on a Zip disk. One of those shareware servers was the first place I encountered fanfic without realizing what it was: a short story about Barney being a harbinger of the apocalypse responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs, among other past events.
I donât remember the exact grade, 8th maybe?, where Ms. Passoneau, the computer teacher, offered an after school mini class on HyperCard and HTML. I think we also learned some AppleScript? I made some silly games and animated presentations and learned the basics of making a web page, skills I still use today. I also remember an I think HyperCard-based game where you had to bloodily massacre Barney. The â90s were a strange time when it came to PBS related content. We also had access to a Sony Mavica which was my first exposure to digital photography. Later in high school I got involved doing layout for the yearbook, although desktop publishing didnât grab me the same as some other kids.
For a 10th grade science class project I set up a GeoCities site, which also had some other random nerd humor stuff. (I donât recall my neighborhood but the archive does still exist on this domain, unlinked.) I got a huge purple hardcover book on HTML (pretty sure it was this one) and was even paid to build a website for my math teacher as well as the Minnesota Resource Recovery Association. Technically my first paid programming gig! (I made way more from babysitting.)
Peak web design
Upgrades
We bought my Grandma a used Performa 5300-series and set it up for her. I distinctly remember walking her through the entire Desktop Metaphor to explain where her files were. She had run a business for years, and used a DOS-based point-of-sale and inventory system, but had never used a computer personally. I grabbed a copy of PhotoShop 3 that came already installed on it before wiping it; I used that for several school projects. I think it also came with a copy of the Oregon Trail II CD-ROM which had little videos of historical characters and a very different vibe from the classic game.
Somehow donât have a picture of me using any of
our computers
By 1999 Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and the iMac had completely changed the design trends of electronics, bringing them back from the brink. I was wanting to do heavier multimedia work, and my sister and I were more frequently conflicting on needing a computer for homework, so we each chipped in from our savings for a share of a B&W G3.
I did all sorts of projects on this machine: DV editing in iMovie via FireWire, animated sequences in Bryce 3D, many school papers, and 5,772 SETI@Home compute-hours (as part of Team MacAddict!). I remember finding some QuickTime VR panoramas of the Arecibo radio telescope to use in a class presentation which super impressed everyone; I guess that kind of tech was still ahead of its time. Sadly I canât find these archived anywhere. I should really fire up an emulator with ClarisWorks and other old applications and try to extract a few of my old projects. Game-wise, I even sometimes managed to convince my parents to let me lug the whole thing to friends houses for LAN parties of Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament. I would sometimes use GameRanger to trick some games into operating their LAN mode over dialup, including Masters of Orion II.
There was, of course, no shortage of Star Trek⊠including the CD-ROM release of 25th Anniversary (complete with actual actor dialogue!) and its sequel, Judgement Rites. I had the Omnipedia with its voice search which seemed like a Trek future that is still struggling to be realized with todayâs models. On the G3 I also had the Quake III powered Elite Force and its Expansion Pack. You wouldnât think a first-person shooter would fit Star Trek but somehow they made it work and gave it a pretty interesting story!
I think by this time performance wise I had switched to surfing using Internet Explorer 5. I was using Sherlock to search Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and more all simultaneously. Sure it was hard to figure out who had indexed a site, but there was definitely a lot less garbage to sift through.
Some time around this here I also got on Napster to very slowly get more music even over dialup. I was using SoundJam MP with this round window Atlantis theme I found. I and friends were burning CDs for sharing and car use. My afore-mentioned Zip drive or the LAN parties were another opportunity to trade MP3s for things not covered in my expanding CD collection, especially with friends who had higher bandwidth collections. This was the main way I got trance and other electronica tracks like those from trance[]control that you wouldnât hear on the radio and generally couldnât find on CD, at least not at our store options.
I think in many ways the B&W G3 is my favorite Mac Iâve ever owned, never mind that many others were more powerful or flexible. An extremely elegant tower with the main board mounted on the door for easy access. It seemed like I could do anything with it. I even liked the oft-maligned hockey puck mouse that came with it, and was common on the iMacs that had started showing up at school. Not to mention it had an excellent color!
Summer Jobs
In high school I had my first job in tech: a summer internship at the Minnesota Muscle Lab, where I would use Unix for the first time (with a cheat sheet!) in their Silicon Graphics lab (Iâm pretty sure these were Octanes) simulating some actin protein structures. This also gave me a taste of academia.
After graduation I worked at the now-defunct Ciprico building a web interface for one of their RAID products, extending a May Program internship. It was also my first bicycle commute, zipping along the shoulder of Highway 55 to get to the next light from our neighborhood and its office park. This involved Windows 2000 machines, and working with an older C backend developer who called the web browser ânutscrapeâ. The team also played Counter-Strike on the network almost every day at lunch. One of the other developers was an expert sniper who went by the username Soldat and called me âLittle Nickyâ. At some point I used a WAD editor to make a custom level for everyone to play. I remember the ladder code being especially tricky.
Middle school and high school were arguably my peak Mac time; I had the free time to experiment, the Web was booming, computers were changing rapidly, and Apple started coming out of its Dark Ages. For the next era, college, I would need my own MacâŠ
#apple #highSchool #hypercard #macintosh #middleSchool #resedit #videoEditing #videoGames #webDesign
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