I wish I had taken more screenshots back in the day. This time capsule from 2002 seems so long ago, but judging from the icons I was already using Toast 5 to burn CDs. We had an HP LaserJet 4 that printed at 600 dpi, fine enough for us to format and print hundreds of books for Lawyers Co-op. Our prints were arranged in big flats as line art and shot to film for plates that printed all those law books you see behind lawyers’ desks in old movies.
I see we already had a version of Photoshop. I remember the first version came on a 3½-inch yellow floppy. An alias on my desktop took me directly to the newsgroups where I was downloading MP3s. They went into the “mp3” folder shown on my external hard drive, “Outskirts.” We were using the Netscape browser at the time. I was using a Kodak DC4800 with a 3.1-megapixel sensor. And Pete LaBonne had just released “Glob” on Earring Records.
I love how simple the Finder window was back then. When I took this shot—at one in the morning—I was doing something in an app called “CDR Updater” (note the upper-right-hand corner). It might have had something to do with the art program Canvas. We were using that app at the time to image 35mm slides for Hampshire Instruments. I miss the wacky alerts you used to get back then.
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