The journey begins...

A spur of the moment decision to purchase a computer in early 1984, began a journey towards an entirely new way of capturing and creating images.

Four years after receiving a BFA degree in photo illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology, that degree had enabled me to leave my janitorial career behind and move on upward to an only slightly more lucrative position as a photographic technician. I worked the evening or B -shift at the Consumer Product Testing Lab in Kodak's Elmgrove Plant from graduation in 1980 until mid 1985. In the lab, we conducted all sorts of bizarre acts on a wide variety of Kodak's consumer cameras. Shocking, dropping, vibrating, freezing, baking, and actuating, actuating, actuating. Did I mention actuating?

The Kodak consumer camera lineup of this period consisted of the 110 format pocket cameras, the 126 format, drop and load cameras, the instant film cameras such as the Crank (or Handle), the Colorburst line and last and certainly the least, the ill-fated Kodak Disc Camera. Now more than two years into production it seemed they were being returned faster than they could make them. Meanwhile, Kodak was also beginning to tip-toe about in the consumer electronics market, with the introduction of a Matsushita-built 8mm camcorder and some magnetic media products, you know, like video tape.

My First Computer

So began my search for just the right computer. After spending what seemed like an eternity in the first store watching a salesperson type command after command, bringing up screen after screen of glowing green text, I seriously began doubting that there was a right computer. The ones I'd seen so far didn't look all that easy to use and I really didn't want to spend a lot of time learning how to type commands, I just wanted to start creating things right away.

Luckily, the second computer store I visited was an Apple dealer. While most of the computers here also had the ugly green text displays, there was hidden in the back corner of the store, this new little computer from Apple called the Macintosh. It didn't look like any of the other computers I'd seen so far and it's built-in screen was black and white, just like ink on paper!

This Macintosh didn't work like the other computers either, it had this thing called a mouse that you could use to point at things on the screen. I watched as the salesman called up a picture of a sneaker in MacPaint, he then circled a piece of that sneaker with this lasso tool, then he clicked on the selected piece and while holding the mouse button down he dragged it all around the screen!   I knew at that instant that I HAD to have THAT computer. This was the "RIGHT" computer, one that had been designed for us visually-centric people. The first computer for us "RIGHT BRAINED" individuals hence the tagline, "The computer for the rest of us."

I ran to the bank and convinced them to let me borrow $3000 so that I could purchase one of these new Macintosh computers right away. I also bought an Apple Imagewriter printer and an Apple 400K external floppy drive to expand my options. The computer itself came fully equipped with a whopping 128K of memory, internal 400K floppy drive, keyboard, mouse and a built-in 9' black & white monitor with a resolution of 512 x 342 pixels. Deciding what software to buy wasn't too difficult, as the only software available for the Macintosh at the time were the two packages that shipped with it... MacWrite and MacPaint.

MacWrite

MacWrite was a immense improvement over any of the word processors of the time. First of all you were working with a white screen with black text as opposed to the common black screen with amber or green text, so it looked alot more like traditional paper already. From the pull down menus you could now select a variety of fonts, styles and sizes and actually view how they would look right on the screen. If you wanted bold text you selected it from the menu and voila it showed up on the screen in bold. There were no messy control characters all over the screen to define the styles. MacWrite introduced the term WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) to the general vocabulary.

What enabled this WYSIWIYG capability was the Mac's, first of it's kind, bit-mapped screen display. Instead of using alpha-numeric characters in a grid to create an image like all other computers of the time, the Mac was the first computer to be able to address every pixel in the display. The graphic controller could then use the pixels to make text, numbers or even images. This was a major turning point in computer technology that thankfully moved us away from text based computer operating systems and towards graphically based computer operating systems. As a result computers have become much, much easier to use.

MacPaint

It was MacPaint however, that had really sold me on the Macintosh. Here was an illustration program that went beyond simple lines and circles. You could now create the illusion of shading because you had complete control over every pixel in an image. Never mind that the pixel was only either on or off (white or black), MacPaint was a testament to the power of the human visual system to perceive a fairly course (72 dpi) pattern of black & white dots as an image.

The Imagewriter Printer

The Imagewriter printer was an incredible printing device, providing the ability to faithfully reproduce anything you could draw on your screen. This was due in part to the fact that the 80 dpi resolution of the Imagewriter was very close to the 72 dpi of the screen. Even more was due to the programming genius behind the Macintosh's Quickdraw routines, Bill Atkinson. Quickdraw was the graphics language that was used by Macintosh applications to draw images and text to the screen and was also used by the printer driver to recreate the screen image in the printer. This allowed greater fidelety between the screen image and the output device than ever before.

This image is the first printout from my Imagewriter shortly after I hooked it up. Note the date in the control panel window. I'd like to point out to you that the disk in the upper corner of the desktop is a 400K floppy disk that contained all my applications and the entire operating system. Those were the days when coding had to be extremely efficient because you only had 128K of memory to work with.

During the first few weeks with my new Macintosh, I set out to accomplish some of the projects I had purchased it for. Creating letterheads, invoices, print labels, advertising fliers and even a darkroom worksheet. As I became increasingly confident in the use of MacPaint, I decided to try illustrating some real objects, and since I was a photographer I chose my traditional tools of the trade, my cameras as subjects.

35mm Half Frame Camera Design

As a result of my disappointment with the Disc camera program at Kodak, I began to wonder if I could design a better camera myself.

Another technician and I had been discussing the camera we'd wished they'd built instead. We imagined a 35mm half frame camera that pulled the film vertically from top to bottom, thereby creating a horizontal image format. It also employed some other unique features for the time, we proposed for example, that the film be wound out of the canister first and then wound back into the canister as it was exposed thus protecting the already exposed film from inadvertant camera back openings. The camera was to be only slightly larger than the Disc camera and would feature an integral sliding cover that would protect the lens and at the same time position the flash farther from the lens to minimize red eye.

I decided to whip up a proposal for our camera design using my new found skill at drawing in MacPaint to draft a prototype camera design. As it turned out, this was to be just the first of many in a long line of my ideas that would fail to be implemented by Kodak.

My photography began to take a back seat as I found I really liked this new way of creating images, the revert and the undo command especially brought the joy back to creating images by hand that I hadn't experienced since grade school. I'd loved designing houses, but hated the tedious drawing, erasing and redrawing required to get something right, only to have it look all smudged up when you were done. My inherited perfectionist tendancies only made it even more frustrating, to say the least.

There were some ideas I'd had for several house designs so I decided to try and see if I could use this new tool to illustrate these ideas as well. The first was an earth-bermed, solar house to be built into the side of hill. The problem I found most challenging with this particular attempt, was that MacPaint limited you to just vertical pages, so I had to design everything sideways. The images are reproduced here correctly rotated but imagine turning the page 90 degrees to work on it. One other serious drawback to MacPaint was the limited resolution and lack of any scale tools. This meant that for any serious drafting it was nearly useless as there are only so many pixels you could put on a page. They would look pretty jaggy when blown up to page size.

About the time I was coming to this realization, I read in MacWorld magazine about a new software program from Apple, that just might address all these shortcomings with MacPaint. The new program from Apple was to be called MacDraw. Instead of pixels this program used mathematical formulas to describe circles, squares and polygons that could be scaled to any size and not have that jaggy look. It had rulers and scaling, and best of all you could paste MacPaint images into the documents to add some detail. Unfortunately, nobody would see a copy of this program MacDraw for nearly another year.