If I Could Turn Back Time: The Macintosh Color Classic

Apple Macintosh Color Classic c.1993
(Note that Photoshop 2.0 is being displayed on the computer’s screen)

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
~Rob Siltanen,
for Apple Computer

This past weekend I had the good fortune to fire up my old Macintosh Color Classic. I got it out of storage where I had been holding on to it because I needed to access some old text files for a series of essays I once published. It seems that my current Mac will not open files created on my old Mac. It’s a strange thing about technology and obsolesce. It happens slowly and sometimes imperceptibly, at least it does to me. Then years go by and you find yourself wanting to return to an idea—a notion you once had that you want to explore again and cannot go back to because the technology prohibits it. Fortunately with my little Color Mac I can travel back in time, to return to those ideas as fresh as they were the day they first came to me and I wrote them down, preserved now on a disk that magically whirred to life when I inserted it into the old machine.

After years of use I was going to pass along this little Mac to someone who might be able to make use of it as I did. However just when I was about to part with it after acquiring a more powerful machine, something wouldn’t allow me to let it go. I carefully packed it up in its box to put it away, holding onto it as one holds on to something from one’s past that held meaning and significance and put it away with so many other meaningful things. I guess I held hope that one day I could flip the power switch on my little Color Mac again and return to those halcyon days when everything on my horizon was new and unexplored and I was just beginning my journey as an artist.