e42 – Douglas Adams and the Mac

Douglas Adams is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but he was also a huge fan of the Macintosh. We discuss his many Macs, interactive fiction, and his extremely astute vision of the future of technology, both fictional and real.

Followup

• Erin McKean's floppy disk of HyperCard stacks
  • e19 – All the words with Erin McKean
  • e35 – HyperCard

Douglas Adams

“I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

• Wikipedia entry
• Official website
• Hitchhiker's Guide "Trilogy"
• The Salmon of Doubt
• "Mankind as sickly as a parrot"
  • xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?
• Adams' Macs
  • First to buy a Mac in Europe
  • Full list of models Adams owned
  • Adams' Macintosh IIfx found
    • cf. famous lost painting found
• Starship Titanic (1998)
  • Wikipedia entry
  • on Macintosh Garden
• "Frank the Vandal" (on HyperCard)
• "Guide to the Macintosh"
• AppleMasters
• Adams on Windows 95

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: 'Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'

• Hyperland
  • Life Story
• Adams' final post on OS X