Personal Computer

By way of this post from Brad Barrish, I came across one of Apple's old marketing campaigns.

Titled "What's on your PowerBook" it leans into the computer as a deeply personal piece of technology. The particular print ad Brad shared in his post immediately caught my attention:

Both Ellis' and Rollins' lists feature deeply personal items. In the case of the former, there's "One of my daughter's poems" and "A detailed record of my wife's dinner parties" in-between a whole lot of corporate to-be-expects like company budgets and marketing plans. But it was Rollins' list that truly caught my eye, with entries like:

• My show log
• My workout log
• The preface to a friend's book
• A lyric book
• Notes for my next video

…and, not least:

• A list of things that are true

It was searching for any references to this last item — did Rollins ever share his list publicly? — that brought me down the rabbit hole and let me discover a bunch of other ad examples from the same campaign. Several were featured in this blog post from back in 2013.

The blog post also featured a video ad, here showcased by the YouTube account vintagemacmuseum, titled "What's on Your PowerBook - G'Pa (1990)". You can watch it here.

The lines spoken by the man in the video are:

I'm 77 years old
I've been a soldier and a father
I've been to war
I've raised a family
I have made mistakes
I have done things I didn't believe I could do
I'm putting it all down where my grandchildren can use it

Before the video ends with a line of text stating "What's on your PowerBook is you."

Sure, this is just a marketing campaign created by Apple in an attempt to sell PowerBooks. But it made clear to me that tech has lost something between then and now. Tech used to be magical in that it let us capture, highlight and reinforce all of the things that made us human.

Nowadays it feels like the opposite is true. Tech today instead makes us less human.

Or perhaps I'm just an old fart longing for the good old days. I wonder if Henry Rollins' list of things that are true might not have a point about that.