The latest version of macOS has a throwback to the original Macs in it.
I was listening to RetroMacCast this morning–it’s a nice, light way to ease into the day–and learned that the latest version of macOS has a wallpaper in it called “Macintosh” that is a throwback to the Macs of my childhood. Apple doesn’t do a lot of nostalgic stuff. It’s really neat.
The Susan Kare pixel art is there, Clarus the Dogcow wags his tail, and the old Control Panel is depicted with the current date and time, meaning it’s not just a video file. It puts today in the frame of yesterday. Connects the present to the past; old me to young me.
It got me a little misty eyed, thinking back to the first time my mom brought her Macintosh 512Ke home from Honeywell to get some work done over the weekend. It blew my ten year old mind. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Nobody had seen anything like it before.
Over the following couple of years I taught myself to program those things. Programming them was a nightmare but was satisfying in a way that tinkering with an Apple II or a Commodore never was. The end result felt so official, so “adult.”
I took my Macintosh SE/30 off the shelf and flanked it with a couple MacBooks running the lock screen animation. It’s the closest I can do to artsy.
Unfortunately I couldn’t power up the old Mac because it’s been an office display piece for fifteen years. It needs to be thoroughly run through before electricity flows into it again. It’s too precious a piece of personal history for me to risk burning it up.
A full video capture of the screensaver is available on YouTube.
Appendices
- folklore.org, inside stories from the development of the original Macintosh.