There’s nothing like a birthday to make you reflect and realize just how quickly time passes. Twenty five years… In the blink of an eye.

On January 24, 1984 Apple Computer released the very first Macintosh. I didn’t hear about it until I received the very first issue of Macworld magazine in March, I think it was.

Being the packrat I am, I saved and preserved that issue. That’s a scan of the cover on the left. If you click it you can see a larger version.

I had to have the Macintosh. I’d been lusting after an Apple IIe for quite a while, and couldn’t afford the ten grand for a Lisa, but this Macintosh thing was a whole new ballgame.

I went down to my local computer store… Compuware, I think it was, and happily plunked down $3300. For that princely sum I got the original Macintosh (with a whopping 128K !), an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer, and the only three, (count ‘em, THREE!), entire programs that ran on it at the time; MacWrite, MacPaint, and Multiplan(a spreadsheet program). That was it.

I still have that Macintosh and the Imagewriter and every piece of software I ever bought for it. And you know what? It still works. I never use it though. I keep it here on a shelf in my studio as a memento and a personal trophy.

I was one of the first people in Texas to own a Macintosh.

Here’s what it looked like the day I bought it on May 19th, 1984, and it’s on my original Unistation prototype workstation.

I justified the purchase of the Mac by using it to produce marketing materials to help get a government contract for my line of Unistation workstations (which I was awarded a year later and had to refuse, but that’s another story).

In the early days I designed, built, and sold solid oak furniture for the Macintosh. Below is a shot of some of those items. I sold a bunch of these tower stands, and rolltop disc storage boxes to the very first CompUSA store, when it opened on Beltway Rd, off Beltline Rd in far North Dallas. I was about to spend a big chunk of money (for me, anyway) on magazine ads to ramp up the business, but right before I did, a company overseas started advertising very similar units at about half the price I could make them. So that ended that. Better to find out early than late!

I use Macs to this very day, although I started switching over primarily to the dark side [*grin*] back in 1996 when Newtek came out with the first version of Lightwave 3D for the PC.

Eventually it got too expensive to keep software updated for both Mac and PC, and I gradually migrated all my production apps to the PC. I still love my Macs, though. I’m platform agnostic. Use the tool you’re most comfortable using and be happy.

Just wanted to let you know about a fix I discovered for Production Premium CS4 applications.

I got my upgrade to CS4 a couple of weeks ago and was excited to get into it and start using it on projects. Adobe applications have always been extremely solid for me over the years, and I’ve grown to rely on that stability.

But I was rapidly disappointed when I crashed Flash CS4 within 10 minutes, doing nothing special or difficult at all. Then SoundBooth CS4 crashed on shutdown (of all things), after successfully letting me find the sound effects I needed for a project with the cool new Resource Manager. Then Premiere Pro CS4 crashed on takeoff. Didn’t even make it past the splash screen. When I did get Premiere to come up and tried to access and use the new Adobe Media Encoder for the first time, it crashed my normally rock solid PC so hard it instantly rebooted.

I. Was. Not. Happy.

I did like the new crash report system that Adobe’s instituted, though. You can send detailed info straight to the engineers after a crash. At first I thought maybe Adobe had released CS4 a little prematurely, as I have never had as many crashes in any of the programs as I did with CS4.

I was about to call Adobe and demand my money back and go back to using rock solid CS3, when I noticed after one crash while my computer was trying to shut down for a reboot, that I got several other crashes in background apps. One of them I recognized as my audio driver program for my Emu 1212 audio card.

That made me wonder, as I have had that one give me trouble in After Effects and Premiere CS3 a few times before, (when I attempted to use the Emu’s ASIO drivers in those programs). So I wondered if maybe checking for and installing any new drivers might make CS4 a bit more stable.  I decided to update my video drivers while I was at it.

Guess what? Not one single crash since, save a Adobe Media Encoder crash, which was actually caused by a faulty Quicktime player app (QT has always given me problems). Otherwise CS4 is solid as a rock.

So if you’re experiencing crashes in your CS4 apps, try updating your audio and video drivers and life might be a lot more pleasant and productive for you.

Oh, and CS4 ROCKS!!!