About

I created MiCMAC, probably the first Macintosh publication 100% made with a Mac, starting in end ‘84, early ‘85. There were only two programs at the time: MacWrite and MacPaint. And that’s the two I began with. But since MiCMAC was printed to paper and had no advertising it came to a very expensive end in ‘91. I had to be a fugitive for a few years.

I fell in love with the Mac as soon as it came out. I had already been looking for a computer for a few years and in the autumn of ‘82, I came to the conclusion that the Apple II was the only serious solution at the time. But with two diskettes readers it was too much money for me.

Then came the Mac in early ‘84 and I had to get one. It was the same kind of money than the Apple II configuration but you had a lot more for the same price and it had something you could not buy before: a graphical interface. Yes I know what some of you will say but how many of you know somebody who seriously projected a single minute to buy a Xerox Star? ! And anyway the Mac was much more sophisticated. As I have always been very good in determining a good quality-price relationship, I saw it was an extraordinary good business deal.

So in september ‘84 I got my first Mac as soon as it became available in my country. A Mac 128k! I had no determined use for it. And there were only two programs at the time: MacWrite and MacPaint. But it was hours of delight…
After three months I decided to publish a bulletin to contact other people who where in the same state of love for the Mac as me. There was absolutely no business plan made because I had no intention to create a magazine at all. Only contact other people like me.

It’s in december that I choose the name and that I made the logo. The name MiCMAC comes from a french word meaning something like imbroglio and it came from an older french name “miquemaque”, meaning disorder, rebellion, itself coming from the middle-age dutch name “muyt maker” that means riot maker. You get the idea and that fits me very well. It’s usually said with a smile. It’s a fun name. It was light years ahead of the dot bubble but yet it was the same kind of name that became popular then, not a serious name, a name like Google, Yahoo, to name a few. Not a business name like MacWorld. But I choose this name especially for it’s new meaning: the relationship between a human, me (MiC) and a machine (MAC). At the time it was written in two words but, web oblige, it’s now in one word since the nineties. In fact this name is all about interface.


I also made the first MiCMAC logo after I choose the name (of course). Fully characteristic of this period it was made with the San Francisco font. It was fun too! And I choose to have all the letters in caps except the second one. Why? Because as we say in french, I’m used to put dots on the i. In other words I’m the kid who said the emperor had no clothes. There also was some premonition because, about one years later, Paul Rand, in designing the NeXT logo, used also all caps except the second letter. By the way I have the brochure that Paul Rand and NeXT issued in spring ‘86 in perfect condition and I’ll scan it and put it on line someday (if it’s possible).

The first issue of MiCMAC (issue 0 in fact) was distributed by me 25 years ago on january 12, 1985 at an Apple event in Versailles… It was only two pages on A4. The people who contacted me after that were waiting something from me, not the kind of things I expected. Then I started the publication of a magazine as a business but with no experience. But that’s another story. I just wanted to talk about the beginning since I’m beginning again.

One thing is important. A few months after I started MiCMAC, Steve Jobs got in trouble with John Sculley and I knew what that meant. But nobody seemed to care at the time. People were too excited discovering the Mac to understand that what was happening meant the death of the Mac in the long term. Like in the classic cartoons where the heroes walk on a cloud or even the open air and it works as long they don’t realize they’re walking on a cloud… Of course I’ll come back to all of this later.

I tried to do publish again, building a web site in ‘95 but I did not want pioneering technology again and since web publishing was very primitive at the time I stopped when I almost finished to put online the old issues of MiCMAC (the most important, about NeXT, are still missing).

In october of 2009, I felt the urge to publish again, in my way, pushed by the incompressible feeling that something REALLY BIG was going to happen again in Cupertino…

And there it goes again. Hope you’ll like it!