I’ve not written much about one of the most interesting of my adult adventure camps. In the early 80’s, it became clear the world was on the brink of one of its infrequent Renaissance periods. This one was the Computer Age and I was damned if I would sit idly by while any renaissance was in play.
So I invested in and founded and subsequently became the CEO of the 6-year Dynamac Computer Adventure. We were the first legal Apple Mac derivative: a 16-pound luggable and pluggable Mac Plus and later Mac Se/30 clone. Apple loved us because we had committed to an
untenable proposition: that a small, under-capitalized company in Denver could purchase Macs from Apple at a slight discount and re-assemble the parts and some of our own inventions into an interesting and useful flat Mac. For a while in the late 1980’s, Dynamac was the MacBook Air of its day, and we appeared on three magazine covers on three continents.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and the MacBook Air arrived. Rex Hammock asked me to compare and contrast my new MacBook Air to the Dynamac I’ve got lying around as a conversation-starter. So last time Doc Searls was in town, he grabbed some photographic evidence of Mac svelteness, right here on E. 43rd St., starting with our traditional breakfast at “Pete’s” Café.
Flickr Pro Zadi Diaz: “OMG! He’s a MacBook Air flasher!” She’s right. Self-parody at its worst.
As with so many such dirty-old-man tropes, it was far easier to whip it out than to put it back. Doc has posted the video evidence, proving that the MBA can fit into a raincoat pocket, but not easily.
Later, back at the East 43rd Street HQ, we did the comparison Rex had asked for. For starters, here’s how $8,000 of luggable Mac evolves over 20 years into a laptop stand:
Reversing the stack (look closely):
Escapable Logic 