A long time ago, etc.

I remember back in 1983 going to a computer show at the Info Mart in Dallas. One of the things I saw there was an Apple Lisa. I only remember that I didn't spend much time with it and that I didn't fully understand what I was seeing. I do remember noting two things: It was a bit pricey at $10000, and that it looked good to me because it had a black on white display like my Sinclair.

Somewhere in 1984 to 1985, I remember checking out the early Macs and getting a very mixed first impression. I liked the system, but it did tend to crash a lot - how much of that was due to beat-up demo units, I don't know. I was looking mainly because I had been reading all this hoopla in the computer press about how great "pull down menus" were until I was sick of hearing about it. To vent my frustration, I programmed up some pull-down menus for a program on my Sinclair. A little man would come running from the side of the screen, jump up and pull down on a cord, thus pulling down the menu (rather slowly animated), then wait until you made a choice and let it roll back up as he ran off the screen. Once I saw the Macs in the flesh, I better understood the usefulness, and promptly went home to redo the menus and entire screen on my program, which ended up looking like a clone of the Mac screen with the same pull-down menus (sans little helper man) that even blinked the choice you made before vanishing. Of course, my program wasn't an entire operating system, but it certainly was easy to use.

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