Steve Job's secret passion

Even if you are not an Apple user/fan, you will find this story interesting. Steve Job's was a big fan of Japanese culture: Zen Buddhism, Japanese cuisine and shin-hanga (新版画), "new woodblock prints" from the early twentieth century. He was particularly fond of the artist Hasui Kawase (川瀬巴水, 1883-1957) whose works he started to collect in 1983. When Jobs unveiled the first Macintosh computer to the media in January 1984, the screen displayed an image of a woodblock print: "A Woman Combing Her Hair", by Goyō Hashiguchi (橋口五葉, 1880-1921).

In March 1983, three young men visited a well-known gallery in Tokyo's posh Ginza district. They wore jeans and t-shirts. One of them was Steve Jobs, the 28-year-old chairman of Apple. The other two were co-founder Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt, a colleague. Matsuoka Haruo welcomed them in English. He had learned the language while working for the gallery's San Francisco branch from 1969 to 1975. "I had no idea who they were," Matsuoka says. "But when I got home, I happened to see an article in the newspaper about Jobs. That's when I realized who had been in the gallery."

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My first mac was an SE, the version with one floppy slot and a 20MB hard drive. I forget what the RAM was, maybe 512 or 768k? Next was an SE30, then some other form factors. Had a Duo once, too.

This machine now is a macbook pro (mid 2014), and across the room is an older mac mini that I hardly use (was in my office). I've wondered about converting that to a media/TV machine. I did some work on it last fall--it now has 16MB of RAM, and one of its two drives is an SSD, so it's pretty snappy, but it's old enough that it won't run the newer systems (this one does).

I'd like a new something or other, but my entire ecosystem is the older USB, and I don't want to deal with 'correcting' all that.