antipopper

I’ve always been quite partial to early ’80s magazines about personal computers, like BYTE. Lately I’ve been turning to them, as I did at the time, as a form of pure entertainment. Really. It’s poetry. All these talismanic words — outdated jargon and now-extinct brands like Valdocs, UCSD p-System, S-100 bus, Sage IV. Before the sedimentation of the current desktop metaphors and hardware tropes, the world of personal computing was far more variegated, full of strange byways and quixotic efforts at world domination with products that were at turns strange and sexy.

And then there was the romance of graphical user interfaces. But back then GUIs were still a crazy idea. Maybe I was born to be a half-assed interface designer, because more than 20 years ago, I drew the headers in my diary in shaky ballpoint to mimic the window title bars of the Apple Lisa, for fuck’s sake. The then-still-unformed vocabularies of interface culture really fascinated me. So when Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore archive takes me back to see how Apple reinvented Xerox’s groundbreaking ’70s desktop concepts, I don’t so much see a prophetic reverse-echo of today’s desktop boredom, but rather a snapshot of a state of flux that was much stranger than I remember.

[Apple Lisa interface test, c.1980]

And Windows? It was shit. And I’m no crazy Mac zealot with no sense of history: I was a Windows 1.0 user in 1985 — I’ve done my time, baby.

[Microsoft Windows interface test, c.1983]

Completely nuts: the GUIdebook.