I bought my first computer in the spring of 1981; took out a small bank loan to get it. It was a North Star Horizon. “A what?” you ask. A North Star Horizon. Rumor has it that the company had been originally named Kentucky Fried Computer, but the Colonel objected, so they changed the name. It ran a Z80 chip on a S-100 bus. Ancient technology, before the IBM PC and before the Macintosh.
I tell that story and others in a working paper from 2015, Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines. I bought my first Macintosh in 1984, a so-called Mac Classic. Another bank loan as I recall. From then on it’s been nothing but Macs, which means that when I moved my stuff from the machine I was running Thursday morning, a 13” MacBook Air from 2020, to my new machine, a 15” MacBook Air with the M3 chip, I was transferring a little over 40 decades of files in one format or another, including a bunch I’ve not been able to open since 3 or 4 operating systems ago. Nothing vital, I suppose, but I’d really like to be able to recover some of those old MacPaint files. Some of them were interesting, but there’s no way I can recreate those images, those patterns, in a contemporary graphics program.
Oh, well, that’s “progress.”
The transfer did not go seamlessly. Just what I had to do, what I had to finagle, the guesses I had to make, not important. Except for the fact that, in my experience – remember, I’ve done this nine times before, well only eight, nothing transferred from the North Star to that first Mac. As I recall, I drafted a significant paper on that old North Star, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, with David Hays. No, when I moved from the Horizon to my first Macintosh, that was starting over from scratch. Anyhow, none of the transitions from one machine to another has gone seamlessly and all of those have been user-friendly Mac to user-friendly Mac.
Anyhow, before that Horizon I did my writing on a portable electric typewriter my parents gave me when I went off to college. I wrote my dissertation on the old Smith Corona. Back then cut and paste was a physical operation. You used scissors to cut out a fragment of text and then pasted it onto another page. Can you imagine?
The transition from that typewriter to the North Star Horizon – my friend Rich Fritzson had coded up a word-processing program for me: “Why?” you ask. We were friends, and besides, he loved working with computers. And this was a new chip, a new assembly language, not to mention Syd Lamb’s associative memory board, all this stuff! – but I digress. That transition was the most significant one for how I write. Before: manual cut and paste. After: digital, so clean! That one change, in how I edited text, was more significant than any that came later, from MacWrite to something else whose name I can’t recall, and from that to MSWord, and all the accumulated bells and whistles of Word.
Of course ChatGPT and later Claude arrived while I had my 2020 MacBook Air, but that didn’t change how I write so much as how I prepare to write. Though I do post a lot of stuff that comes straight out of the bots, but I frame it as coming from the bots, not from me, though I prompted the bot. Yes, that is a change in my “production function,” as Tyler Cowen calls it, and a significant one.
Will the Apple Intelligence that comes bundled with this Mac have any further effect? Don’t know. I suppose it will make Siri more effective, perhaps more useful. But I’ve never used Siri, didn’t find it very useful. Perhaps I should reconsider. And then there’s some image-making app, Image Playground. Played around with it for five or ten minutes and got nothing out of it. Nothing. I should probably give it some more time. But there is a significant list of things I can use Apple Intelligence for. Looks like I can use it to proofread documents, and other stuff. I’ll have to look into that.
Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do. No more playing around with the new stuff.
But I’ll say this, the new machine is palpably faster than the old. Woohoo!
More later.
Have fun!
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