Mac Puzzles Old and New
Two things that caught everyone’s eyes when the Mac debuted were its screen—full of pictures instead of undecipherable lines of text—and its mouse. With the latter, an unfamiliar device one pushed around on the desk in order to move a pointer arrow on the screen, a Mac user could manipulate those pictures on the screen. It was a “graphical user interface” and it was all about visual affordances: windows you could drag, buttons you could press, sliders you could slide.
Of course, the Mac that came out of a bag in January 1984 looked a lot different from any of today’s Macs…but not everything about it was completely different. Look at what was on its screen (Figure 1) and then look at what’s on yours today. The windows ...
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