Corner Details
Jan. 24th, 2018 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAn Apple news site linked to a old photo of Susan Kare, the bitmap artist most associated with shaping the on-screen look of the original Macintosh (although she was also later hired to design icons for Microsoft Windows 3). The link was promoted with the comment the picture was at a high enough resolution you could get a good look at details in the background of Kare's office, so I followed the link to the photo. Taking in the clutter behind Kare (who, sprawled back in her desk chair, did fill most of the frame), I first noted the artwork and design books, then looked at the upper left of the picture. All of a sudden, a different bit of 1980s trivia kicked in. A red toy robot on the shelf looked familiar; I could put a name to it at once as Inferno, the Autobot fire truck from the Transformers.
That, though, fed back into the bit of history I'd first had in mind looking at the picture, and got me wondering. I knew Inferno had been on sale in 1985, but associating that year with the people at Apple brings up thoughts of crisis. I've seen the narrative that Macintosh sales numbers were dropping, the people who'd made the computer were still burnt out and unmotivated if not dropping out the company altogether, and outside observers were dusting their hands together and making proclamations of sluggish and compromised hardware that would either have to be massively upgraded (just perhaps to match their own preferences) or just abandoned for the sake of the Apple II. It just felt a bit late in the game; I'd always supposed the "Macintosh team" had been celebrated and documented around the beginning of 1984. For that matter too, I'd made out "1983/84 Texaco Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast Schedule" on a newspaper clipping in the picture.
As I'd had those thoughts, anyway, I'd already recognised the squatter, drabber toy robot next to the red one in question, and in the top right corner of the picture a box behind some smaller toy robots had me thinking that particular toy was a Monster Destroid from Macross, not the "MAC II" it was renamed and repackaged for Robotech as. It did take just a bit longer to connect the thought of Kare managing to get one of those toy mecha in whatever fashion with remembering that before a fire truck that turned into a red toy robot had been given a name and personality over in America, it had been in sale in Japan as part of the "Diaclone" toy line with a small, easy to lose, and hard to characterize "pilot figure" included. With that possibility in mind, I went back to the link to record it and found some additional information linked to, where Susan Kare herself mentioned people at Apple had brought back toy robots from trips to Japan.
The explanation was good enough and more than welcome; thinking of Macross and then Robotech had reminded me that in just the last little while, where some have been redeploying their long-rooted indignation at the latest attempts to squeeze a bit more money from the brand name of the less reputable composite, I've been chewing again on the question of what a particular internal contradiction in the Robotech novels might say about how the whole thing came together, a question I've had no solid answer to for two decades now. While dismissive answers have been available for longer than that, of course, I'm afraid I've found them as unsatisfying as the "I'm right; you're wrong" arguments over timelines that left me with the question in the first place. At the same time, I was also stuck just wondering if it was at all a good thing the Transformers trivia had come to mind so fast. These days I don't chase after the expensive "collector's items" or the affordable and oft-revamped toys, much less the media associated with either nostalgia or selling the current toy line, but as I've already shown I can read idly through the "Transformers Wiki." Still, I did manage to tell myself Susan Kare didn't have those particular toys in her office because she'd seen their exact forms back when she'd been an impressionable child, even if there'd still been toy robots in the previous decades.
That, though, fed back into the bit of history I'd first had in mind looking at the picture, and got me wondering. I knew Inferno had been on sale in 1985, but associating that year with the people at Apple brings up thoughts of crisis. I've seen the narrative that Macintosh sales numbers were dropping, the people who'd made the computer were still burnt out and unmotivated if not dropping out the company altogether, and outside observers were dusting their hands together and making proclamations of sluggish and compromised hardware that would either have to be massively upgraded (just perhaps to match their own preferences) or just abandoned for the sake of the Apple II. It just felt a bit late in the game; I'd always supposed the "Macintosh team" had been celebrated and documented around the beginning of 1984. For that matter too, I'd made out "1983/84 Texaco Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast Schedule" on a newspaper clipping in the picture.
As I'd had those thoughts, anyway, I'd already recognised the squatter, drabber toy robot next to the red one in question, and in the top right corner of the picture a box behind some smaller toy robots had me thinking that particular toy was a Monster Destroid from Macross, not the "MAC II" it was renamed and repackaged for Robotech as. It did take just a bit longer to connect the thought of Kare managing to get one of those toy mecha in whatever fashion with remembering that before a fire truck that turned into a red toy robot had been given a name and personality over in America, it had been in sale in Japan as part of the "Diaclone" toy line with a small, easy to lose, and hard to characterize "pilot figure" included. With that possibility in mind, I went back to the link to record it and found some additional information linked to, where Susan Kare herself mentioned people at Apple had brought back toy robots from trips to Japan.
The explanation was good enough and more than welcome; thinking of Macross and then Robotech had reminded me that in just the last little while, where some have been redeploying their long-rooted indignation at the latest attempts to squeeze a bit more money from the brand name of the less reputable composite, I've been chewing again on the question of what a particular internal contradiction in the Robotech novels might say about how the whole thing came together, a question I've had no solid answer to for two decades now. While dismissive answers have been available for longer than that, of course, I'm afraid I've found them as unsatisfying as the "I'm right; you're wrong" arguments over timelines that left me with the question in the first place. At the same time, I was also stuck just wondering if it was at all a good thing the Transformers trivia had come to mind so fast. These days I don't chase after the expensive "collector's items" or the affordable and oft-revamped toys, much less the media associated with either nostalgia or selling the current toy line, but as I've already shown I can read idly through the "Transformers Wiki." Still, I did manage to tell myself Susan Kare didn't have those particular toys in her office because she'd seen their exact forms back when she'd been an impressionable child, even if there'd still been toy robots in the previous decades.