One of the great parts about my day job is working with talented students on fun projects, like our recently-launched Albion 1995 throwback video.
The idea? What Albion College was like in 1995, told through music and technology.
The team did an amazing job starring in this thing, grabbing vintage (”vintage” – oy, I remember 1995!) clothing, and being good sports. For my part, it was all shot on an iPhone 5S, often using the VHS Camcorder app for the ‘95 scenes.
It had been so long since I booted up my Newton eMate that, before taking a photo of it, I had to recharge its meager battery.
But like clockwork (and like all of Apple’s Newton PDAs), it started up like no time had passed – it’s familiar grid of app icons hinting at future Apple products.
It used to be that I ran a decently popular blog, Newton Poetry, writing about the eMate and its MessagePad cousins. There used to be not a day that passed that I wouldn’t scribble on one of these green screens, hacking my Macs to get them to install new software, or discovering some long-abandoned app that still, after all these years, seemed useful.
But now my eMate sits on a shelf in my office, along with my Newton MessagePad 110, a few non-working iPods, and other miscellaneous Apple products. It’s joined the assorted classic Macintoshes that I just haven’t found room for in my life.
Not after buying a house, and not after taking up photography as a full-time hobby.
The truth, though, is that booting this little green guy up made me happy. It made me happy to still see it working. It made me happy to see all the apps I installed to monkey around with. And it made me happy thinking about all those fun blog projects, from 2007 to 2011, that I tackled.
I keep thinking I’ll kick-start the blog again, instead of leaving it languishing with a few random photo posts here and there. There’s a collection of articles just waiting for commentary. The project stuff, though – there just doesn’t seem much room for that stuff. Not any more.
Still, my eMate and I? We had a lot of fun together. And now that I brought it back to life, maybe we’ll have some more fun.
