1988

Among the retrospectives on Steve Jobs following his death, this quote jumped out at me: "Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology." This got me thinking about our class, the first in the nation to be offered computers for purchase and a wired campus platform in which to use them. I asked some of the '88s who were featured on the cover of the Boston Globe Magazine, happily receiving their Macintosh 128K computers in the fall of 1984, to share some Mac memories.

Bill Cummings recalled, "We were exiting one of the buildings after picking up the big white boxes with the Apple logo on the side. A Globe reporter asked if there were any Massachusetts natives in the crowd and then swooped in and took the picture. I still have an issue or two up in my attic somewhere. There was also another very cool picture in the article that showed a long line of white Apple 18-wheelers traveling along the highway headed toward campus. I'm not positive, but I remember the Macintosh being really expensive—maybe even somewhere north of $2,000. And if you purchased a printer as well the outlay was even more. As an English major I remember using it mostly for writing papers. I also used it for writing letters home and for resumes and cover letters (no more typewriters). As for video games, I remember playing a lot of Lode Runner and some crude boxing game. No Internet obviously."

Steve Carlotti sent this great list: "1) They were small. That's part of what made them cool. They were these little boxes sitting on your desk as opposed to the big and clunky things connected to the cathode ray tube monitors of old. 2) They were fun. I remember the watch icon and the smiley face at startup. So different from what had come before—blinking cursors and the like. 3) With the benefit of decades of hindsight, they really didn't work that well. They crashed a fair amount, which would be unacceptable in today's world. The original hard drives had almost no memory. I remember that the largest MacWord document I could keep was about eight pages when I was a freshman. 4) They sot better really fast. I wrote my senior fellowship paper on a Mac. It was a good 200 pages long and I think it all fit in two files on the hard drive rather than on a collection of floppies. 5) Seemingly overnight, they were everywhere—dorm rooms, the computer lab, Baker, everywhere."

There was a dark side of this technological trailblazing, of course. Remember the screams echoing down the hallways at 2 a.m. when someone's screen flashed a bomb icon and hours of work had been lost? Remember the ugly rumors of classmates requiring intervention to break their XYZ gaming addictions? Perhaps we should leave these memories in the past and dedicate a future column to our favorite apps instead!

Sincere thanks to Regina Glocker for serving as our Alumni Council representative for the past three years. The class will choose her successor from a list of several terrific '88s who expressed interest in the position. If you haven't already voted, please do so via the link on www.dartmouth88.org before March 1.

Cheers.

4510 Drexel Ave., Edina, MN 55424; jjlonnquist@earthlink.net