Twenty Years Ago Today

Special to the Star-Telegram

Twenty years ago I stopped using DOS-based computers and switched to Macintosh, when Apple introduced the first Mac Cx. It had one megabit of RAM and a 20-megabit hard drive (which lasted six whole months, and replacing the Apple drive cost over $3,000). That one computer, a 13-inch color monitor, an 8-bit scanner and a few pieces of key software cost $10,000 at the time. This past weekend, as I finished digitizing my collection of 300 DVD movies for playback on my Apple TV, it suddenly struck me just how far the computer industry has come since 1989.

Twenty years ago was also the year that the Japanese entered the American luxury car market in a serious way, leading with the Lexus LS sedan. Yet somewhere along the way, the super-advancement of both computers and automobiles has ceased to inspire more than a big yawn with the public. People today seem far more impressed with the similarly impressive advances in cell phone technology than anything else, but let’s compare how technology and cost reductions have truly improved things for all of us.

Computer: From Two Photos to 450 Movies

In 1989 the promise of what a personal computer could do for the average or advanced person was just beginning to become apparent. Although computer connections to cyberspace were notoriously slow at the time, the adventurous could subscribe to CompuServe and have access to virtually every newswire service and story in the world for a mere $10 an hour. Or, for $3 an article one could easily pull up by subject keyword virtually every important study, research paper or published article and have thousands of stories to choose from in seconds.

Those early adapters knew the Internet was coming in 1989; just four years later Mosaic became the first Web browser and changed everything. 1989 was the year that Digidesign first offered Sound Tools, which later became ProTools – now the music industry standard for multi-track recording. (Last summer when I was in England working on an album project, the studio and my chief engineer had just finished the soundtrack for the movie The Dark Knight, recorded, mixed and finished in that software using a Macintosh. Amazing.)

Adobe’s Photoshop was licensed that year also. Yet somehow the magic of computers has become the norm, so the fascination of what they can do has long since been lost. Similarly, being able to Google for all the information in the world quickly and for free is also taken for granted today. Frankly, the news industry had a much better business model 20 years ago, when they charged for their content at online services such as CompuServe, StarText or Dialog. And if the truth be known, those services worked far better when they used proprietary software than they work today using free Web-based systems.

But as I was checking those 300 DVD movies to ensure that they worked properly through my Mac, the Apple TV and our home TV, I took a moment to reflect and was amazed. For in 1989, my original Macintosh could hold only two 8x10 black and white photos; my current system can hold so many full-length movies that if you played them back to back, 24 hours a day, it would take 25.2 days to watch them all. That is nothing sort of incredible, and yet it escapes our appreciation.

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