The Mactoons cartoons are from the 1980s, appearing in “Macintosh User Group” newsletters about the original Apple Mac, and now collected here. I picked them up expecting a trip down nostalgia lane back to my first Apple II, with in-jokes only relevant to that community that had dated horrifically.

No. It turns out that in forty years, computers have not changed much. The jokes about the Mac convention, the relational database, and software piracy are still so very true. If you stick an “i” in front of the word Mac, and substitute IBM with Windows 10, they’d be pretty much up to date.

About the only thing that has dated are some of the jokes about modems, which might throw a casual reader but any serious geeks will get, if only to groan at. The joke about old OSs, like MS-DOS, is even more relevant now that technology is going out of date every year instead of every ten. The MAC vs IBM wars are now Mac vs Microsoft, but the jokes still sadly apply.

Seriously, any cartoon that includes the words:

“Try praying to Microsoft”

has to be recommended.

Geeks should get this. Just get it. Now. For anyone else it is less a trip down memory lane and an alternately humourous and horrific confirmation that the more things change the more they stay the same. Read it anyway!