Why the Mac Rocks

This video is over twenty years old. Steve Jobs had a full head of hair back then. He wore a bowtie. He was the consummate showman. In this video he's introducing the Mac. From 1984. I was watching this video in a video listed, in one person's humble opinion, as one of the ten best presentations ever (in the English language, presumably).

Why was the Mac so exciting? You could see it nearly right away, though it may not be so obvious.

Fonts.

That's right. Fonts.

The first computer my dad bought for the family was an Apple 2e. No, no, to be fair, the first computer was this one hundred dollar Timex Sinclair. It had a membrane keyboard. Each key was a shortcut to some Basic keyword. In those days, personal computers had to run BASIC, at least, for those who cared to program.

We whined as kids at this cheap computer. Ah, so young, and yet so swayed by the desire to have an expensive computer.

I wanted an Atari. My friends had an Atari, with a tape cassette drive and a cartridge that could play space games. I thought it was cool.

Dad got an Apple instead. 64K of memory. Floppy disks that were actually floppy. No hard drives. No real OS to speak of. Certainly, no GUIs, no windowing, no threading, no caching. It hardly qualified as a computer.

And what was the killer app in those days? There were two. Spreadsheet programs which, honestly, haven't evolved a great deal since then, and the word processor.

In those days, just being able to capture words and save them and print it on a crappy dot matrix computer whose output sucked ass was the state of the art. It looked awful. It was awful. This wasn't the work of calligraphers who spent half a lifetime trying to write letters as if it were high art, every curve full of meaning, every flourish, a signifier of beauty. Printing and writing were monotonously efficient, a product of a lack of resources and imagination.

When the first Mac came out, Jobs must have thought "fonts". Fonts would distinguish the Mac. It would print letters that would be good enough to go in a magazine.

You know who I thought would have cared about fonts. Donald Knuth. Yet, look at TeX. It came in two fonts. There was the regular default font and there was the math font. Nothing else. Donald chose the font for us. How else could you explain the lack of choice of fonts in TeX which lasted many years after it became available?

It's all the more shocking because Knuth is an aesthete. He cares about beauty. He wrote TeX because he saw computers and programs taking over printing, and the high quality of printing once done laboriously by hand was disappearing, only to be replaced by something inferior.

Knuth, being both a computer scientist, and someone who cared about beauty, did what only a computer scientist could do. He wrote a program. It would lay out characters as only a master could. It would know something about kerning. It would know about ligatures. Alas, you had to practically be a programmer to get TeX to do its things, since it wasn't WYSIWIG. You basically compiled TeX.

And it didn't have fonts.

And the Mac did.

And it managed to print out using crappy dot matrix, those fonts. Characters were two or three times larger than the ones I would print out on my dad's old rattly Epson printer. But in that size increase came the early attempt at nice fonts.

That introduction to the Mac seems rather dated now. From Jobs clothing, to the crappy way the screens look, to the awful voice. Still, it was something people had never seen, and it drove the fans in the audience to orgasmic delight, as Jobs got his first taste of adulation, from those sitting in the front row, to those two balconies up right up to the rafters. And gloriously addicted he must have been.

I look back at that presentation, surprised I can hear the high pitched whine that was, sadly, not removed, and sadly, still within the threshold of my hearing (meaning, it probably runs at 14 Khz).

It was a nostalgic trip to a time when I remembered using the Mac, in the fall of 1986, two years after the world was first introduced to the Mac. It wasn't the fancy graphics (not so fancy), nor the white background (not the green/amber on a black background). It was the fonts that made the early Macs rock.

And ever since, everyone's had to care about fonts. And we're a better world for it.

Were it not for the fact that font cost money. You have to pay for art. If someone could make money on the alphabet they would. And making money on fonts appears to be the second best way to do it.

Although I'd rather fonts be freely available to all who care, at least there are fonts out there we can use, from the much derided Comic Sans, to the Skia that I'm using now, to the ubiquitious Times New Roman and Helvetica and Arial and Palatino.

Great fonts have pushed the computer beyond the number crunching automaton that it could have been, into something that can be thought of as creative and beautiful.