The crane

I've been meaning to do something with this crane for a while, although I'm not sure this is it. But it was there as I was driving past and it looked quite good silhouetted against the sky, which I'd been watching kind of being in the wrong place since I crossed the bridge.

Aye, so Steve. You just have to reminisce about when you were recruited into the cult of Mac. I remember it well - October 1987, Glasgow College of Technology, I had just started back for my fourth year and was sent by friend and lecturer to see the new computer lab. Twenty Mac Pluses, each loaded with 128k of RAM and with two floppy disk drives. Two! One for the operating system and all your software and one for your documents. Hilarious to think of it now. All networked to a Stylewriter where you could use as much paper as you liked and a Laserwriter at 10p a sheet. Thrilling stuff. So I set myself up in a corner and frittered away the prospect of a first teaching myself to use MacWrite, Pagemaker and Adobe Illustrator.

When I started working at the College when I graduated, I was teaching desktop publishing to time-served printers desperate not to see their jobs disappear. It must have been terrible for them, with decades in the print industry being taught their future by a wee boy who'd picked it up in his spare time. I had my own SE30 with an external A4 monitor and disk drive that I used to humph home on the bus to play with at the weekend. I still use my work monitor on its side, portrait. Now there's MacBooks, Mac Minis, iPhones, iPods and iPads all over the house, hooked together on Airport base stations. Fanboy. I hope they don't fuck it up like they did he first left. He'll not be coming back to fix it this time.

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