Happy Birthday Apple!

Happy Birthday Apple Computer, Inc! It's 30 years since April Fool's Day, 1976.

I was 11 years old. I'd grew up on Apple Computers. I never got my hands on an Apple I, but I saw one of the original ads from those days of Sir Isaac reposing under a tree. He was about to be bonked and would change the world.

Centuries later, Wozniak & Jobs would guarantee to change the world as well. With a twist of Yankee ingenuity and California cool.

I remember the Apple II, the Apple III, the IIc, the Lisa - upon which I created my first commercially-sold graphics for Carnegie Mellon University.

And of course the Macintosh.

I fell in love with Alice. It was poetic we could see her through the looking glass of black-and-white pixels.

After college I bought a Macintosh Plus. It was stolen out of my Astoria, Queens apartment. So I bought a Mac II.

Yet no sooner had I plunked down my $7,200 for a fully-tripped-out system (4mb of RAM at the time alone was $2,000!) than I moved from NYC to Silicon Valley.

1989. I read The Macintosh Way on my way over on the plane. I intended to have a great trip to the SF Bay Area.

I met Guy Kawasaki (who had moved on to ACIUS) and shook his hand. To thank him for writing the book.

I got a job at ComputerWare, the best Mac dealer in the Bay Area at the time, until 1991.

Apple had indeed changed my life.

I had a wonderful stint at the Apple System 7 AnswerLine 1991-1992. A magical moment. I moved on to Cisco, though, where I fondly watched from afar.

Many folks might not remember this, but Cisco was a Mac shop in those days. At least in Customer Service c. 1992-1994. Windows 95 knocked them off the desktop. (The engineers were, of course, hard-core Unix and Open Source wonks.)

So, fast forward through my era of having to put up with mockery of others with Windows95. I kept my six-color-blood until the logo turned blue.

I had a PowerBook early in my Cisco stint, and went through many different machines: 680x0s, G3s and G4s.

Now dual-core Intels? iPods? Cool!

Huzzah & Happy Birthday!