I do remember seeing Apple's "1984" commercial that introduced the Macintosh during Super Bowl XVIII -- that was the first Super Bowl I remember paying attention to, seeing as how it was taking place in Tampa and my father and uncle were at the game. However, at the time I was using an Atari 800XL, so who cares about Apple?

Once I was in college, I didn't have a computer of my own my freshman year (sometimes I used my roommate's, and sometimes I used lab computers). At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, my grandfather gave me a Macintosh LC II, which he had bought about a year earlier but hadn't used much. It had a 16 MHz processor, a 40 MB hard drive, and 4 MB of RAM. That was in the fall of 1993.

In the spring of 1996, I suggested to my parents that they could give me a new Mac as an early graduation present -- the rationale being that I could buy it at the campus computer store and get the educational discount. What I bought was a Power Macintosh 7500/100, with a 100 MHz processor, a 1 GB hard drive (apple-history.com's stats are incomplete in saying it came with only a 750 MB drive), and if I recall correctly, 16 MB of RAM (apple-history.com is very incomplete, since it says it came with 0 MB of RAM).

In the summer of 2000, that computer was starting to feel inadequate, especially when The Sims came out for the Mac. I had to use my own money this time and couldn't get an educational discount, and what I bought was a Power Macintosh G4/400, after the February 2000 speed bump, so this was the low-end model. That's a 400 MHz processor, a 10 GB hard drive (again, apple-history.com's stats are incomplete on hard drive sizes), and 64 MB of RAM. Over the years, I added 128 MB of RAM, and then another 512 MB of RAM, for a total of 704 MB; I also added a 120 GB hard drive and then, years later, replaced the 10 GB hard drive with a 200 GB hard drive for a total of 257 GB (because this computer could only handle a 137 GB maximum on hard drives).

And that computer started to feel inadequate in 2004, but various life events conspired to keep me from getting a new computer until Monday, August 7, 2006, when I purchased the brand new Mac Pro on the day it was released -- and if you paid attention to the original release dates on the other three Macs I've had, you may notice that I didn't get them until relatively late in their product lives, something I deliberately tried to avoid here. I didn't actually receive it until Wednesday the 9th. Apple-history.com doesn't have a page for it yet, but here's what it looks like...



Well, you know, it's shiny and looks like a cheese grater. What more do you need? It's the "stock" configuration (no build-to-order options from Apple's web site, which is how I got it in only two days), with two 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon dual-core processors, for a total of 10.66 GHz, plus a 250 GB hard drive, plus 1 GB of RAM. Once my wallet recovers from this hit, I'm probably going to add another hard drive -- I can't use any of the hard drives that were in the G4/400, because they use old-timey parallel ATA connections, but the Mac Pro uses the newfangled serial ATA. It's all a conspiracy between Apple and the hard drive manufacturers, I'm sure of it.

You may think that (what is effectively) four 2.66 GHz processors would be a lot faster than one 400 MHz processor, and you would be absolutely correct -- heck, I don't think I've even taxed the computer enough to make it use more than one of the cores at a time yet. Now the big bottleneck is my DSL service, which tops out at about 500 Kbps. (My only other option is cable, which would be a little pricey for me, especially since I'm not getting my TV that way.) And the other problem is this multibutton Apple "Mighty Mouse" that it came with -- I'm so used to having a one-button mouse on the Mac that I keep pressing on the right side of the mouse, which causes a right-click to happen. Yes, I could change the settings and turn it into a one-button mouse, but I want it to act like a "real" mouse for when I eventually get the hang of it.

It's nice, for once, to have the best personal computer on the planet, at least for a little while, when the people who ordered the upgrade to 3 GHz processors start getting their Mac Pros.

Oh, and extrapolating, I can predict that I will get my next Mac in 2015; it will contain four quad-core 5 GHz processors (for a total of 80 GHz), plus a 2 TB hard drive, plus 8 GB of RAM. No prediction on what it will be called. Hopefully, it'll do a reasonably good job running The Sims 4 -- which will of course be true virtual-reality software, and which I will of course use solely to create female sims who live in a sorority house and have lots of pillow fights.

Levi sent me a link to this beautifully illustrated 1942 map of Los Angeles in the Library of Congress's collection, which reminded me that I have in my collection a 1956 booklet published by the Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles titled "Freeway Map of Los Angeles." It's specifically dated August 1956, so it's now exactly 50 years old.

The extent of the freeway system...



Detail of the Hollywood Freeway, from its terminus at Vineland and Ventura (lower left of upper map) to downtown (lower right)...



And the best thing in the booklet: a detail of what it calls the "Los Angeles interchange," complete with photographs of the signs (people know this today as the intersection of the 101 and the 110 freeways, and the current signs -- which are at least 20 years old -- are fairly similar)...