Of Macs and Maps
2009; SPIE; Volume: 48; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1117/1.3127130
ISSN1560-2303
Autores ResumoOf Macs and MapsThis editorial is being written on my new Mac computer.It is one of many that I have had over the years.I have no wish to engage in one of the technotheological battles that seem to erupt once someone has declared his or her colors ͑Mac or PC͒.Rather, I want to consider what my Macs have enabled me to do during the 25 years that they have been available.Actually, our family started with an Apple II soon after it was introduced in 1977.Before we bought one, I spent several weeks trying to handicap the computer race.I would go into a computer store and try all the brands that were on the market, read all the early computer magazines, then go back again.It may have been the fact that you could use a small color TV as a monitor with the Apple that caused me to buy one.Or it might have been because the kids could jump right in and use it.I ordered it before we left to go to the beach for our summer vacation.We returned to Atlanta and before going home, we picked up the machine and an additional 48 KB of RAM for $80.͑Wow!A whole 64K of memory!͒Once at home the kids ͑including me͒ immediately loaded the programs on tape cassettes that came with the machine and ran them that weekend.͑I still have the cassettes of Lemonade Stand and Brian's Theme.͒The next week we wrote our own programs.I wrote a Jack-o'-lantern program that we ran with the monitor in the window during Halloween.I collaborated with one of Ronchi's students on a ray trace program, EZ-ray.͑The first thing I did was to write a missing Seidel coefficients routine for it.͒I wrote some small programs for Apple magazines and made just enough money to be able to deduct the machine on my taxes.I was beginning to write a movable map routine, which used the map from The Lord of the Rings to display parts of Middle-earth, when the first Macintosh appeared.I bought an early model and lugged it out to Arizona to the Optical Sciences Center where I spent an academic year with Bob Shannon and Stacey Dereniak.I taught myself how to use MacDraw to make electronic circuit patterns ͑maps, as it
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