We got our first Mac in 1984, and Lawrence Krauss was the Johnny Appleseed who planted the first Macintosh seed.
In 1984, Frank and I were trying to collaborate on a book by using the arcane word-processing stuff on the VAX/VMS at UCSB’s Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Then one day, a young physicist named Lawrence Krauss rode into town, carrying with him everywhere
a big 15-pound plastic box he called a Mac.* We had never imagined lugging our good old
Atari 800 on our trips. (We used it to play simple games on an old TV set, and to write simpler games in Atari BASIC.) What did this “Mac” have that our computer didn’t?
Lawrence was eager to demo MacWrite and MacPaint. (MacWrite was [NOT*] the inspiration for Microsoft Word, only simpler and much more reliable.) We were instant converts, and so were our kids! I still have pages and pages and pages of dot-matrix printouts of their MacPaint creations to prove it.
The Mac was just what we needed to collaborate.
- Never mind that you had to save everything on a [128 K]** floppy.
- Never mind that no single chapter could be more than about 10 pages long.
- Never mind that the “illustrations” I created with the dot matrix printer were black and white and lumpy with pixels all over.
That first Mac was a wonderful revelation of just how much better computers could make people’s lives, and we’re still grateful to Lawrence Krauss (now here at the APS meeting with us, where he gave 3 (3!) fine talks!)
Long before Lawrence wrote The Physics of Star Trek, he helped us boldly go where no Wilczek or Devine had gone before.
* Oops — the Mac plus keyboard plus etc. plus bag weighed 22 lbs! Thanks to Kuba Tatarkiewicz of MIT for links to the original Mac spec
and to a computer timeline that makes it clear Microsoft’s Word predated MacWrite’s invention.”
** Oops again! and thanks to Kuba for pinging me that the size of the floppy “was 400 kB, while RAM of the original Mac was 128 kB, hence the so called Macintosh elbow when you tried to copy a floppy on a single-drive Mac (I once did 27 inserts – it was very painful!).”