The Finder Was My House
Well before the internet, John lived inside his computer, and the Finder was his house.
Podcast: Upgrade
Episode: 496: 40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft
John: Back before the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours and hours, kind of like John’s parents feared he would, sitting in front of my computer. And this computer was not connected to any network. I had no way to get new software onto it. It was just a computer in my house, no modem, no internet, no BBS, no America Online, nothing. It was just me and that computer.
And in that little world, it was just like playing with a tiny, you know, electrical dollhouse. I was rearranging everything. I was setting things up the way I wanted. I would launch applications. I would use ResEdit to manipulate them. It was like being in a garage with your car and your tools. And there’s nothing else there. Like once or twice a year, I’d go to my grandfather’s house and get a new floppy disk from the Mac user group. And I’d have some new software.
But for the rest of the amount of time, I try to talk to my kids about this. I would use a computer for hours with no access to the internet and no new software. And like, what were you doing? And a lot of what I was doing was spending time in the Finder, you know, manipulating things, launching new things, moving things around. You know, I’d go into applications and I’d go back to the file. I should still put up on my old computers. I had everything so arranged. All the windows were arranged the way they were supposed to be at custom icons and everything.
It’s just it was beautiful. It was a lovely place to live. Well before we all like lived on the internet, I lived inside my computer and the Finder was my house.
