You had to be there
There’s a particular kind of technological shift that’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who came after it. Not because it’s complicated, but because the world it changed has vanished so completely that the change itself becomes invisible.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading Seth Godin’s note on the Mac’s 42nd anniversary. He argues, correctly, that the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad wasn’t what saved Apple’s strange new computer. It was the people who made the Mac genuinely better: Guy Kawasaki building the developer ecosystem, Susan Kare designing the icons, the late great Bill Atkinson setting unreasonable standards for the interface. “Hype is a trap,” Seth writes. “Better is better.”
