Hello and welcome!
This website is the result of a group project for our ENGL 1102 class at Georgia Tech titled Archives that Matter, in which our class considered multimodal presentations using the WOVEN approach in order to create an archive and draw a conclusion based on the archives present.
For this website, we examined an archive of Apple computers and their rhetorical work, as well as annotated a diverse array of primary and secondary sources that brought perspective to, and occasionally complicated our approach to, the rhetoric of our archive. In addition to secondary sources, one of our group members went to RetroTech (a resource determined to preserve technological pasts as Georgia Tech) and examined the Apple II, Macintosh Performa 550, Power Macintosh 8500/120, and the iMac. Our secondary sources consisted of magazines from different Mac computer eras as well as blog posts from more recent years.
By doing research to find others’ user experience as well as our own user experience on older Apple products, our goal was to determine how the user experience of Apple Computers continued to evolve throughout its production and how much Apple took user experience into the design of later products.
Because our project involves technological evolution, the main audience our project appeals to are students, professionals, and computer enthusiasts in the Computer Science and Engineering fields that want to know more about Apple Computers and their evolution. Also, students looking to purchase an Apple computer in the future may be interested in the history of the user experience over the years and the starting of such a large-named company today. Our goal is to raise awareness of the steps Apple has taken in the past in order to make Mac computers easily accessible by the consumer and consider how Apple in the future can continue to provide updates to better the user experience overall.