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Everyone’s favorite fruit company was cheekily founded on April Fools Day 1976. We had Apple ][s at Kennedy Jr high, but I never got interested in them. It was not much of a leap from the terminals and teletypes my dad had in his home office. He was excited about home computers and we got a Commodore 64 pretty early, but beyond a few games, I found it boring. When I started at SJSU, they had Macs in the library that you could sign up for to write papers and print them out on the laser printer. I was a terrible typist, so the undo/redo and copy paste features (as well as all the cool fonts and the high quality print output) were all game changers. I was taking a pascal class at the time and we were using IBM 286’s with DOS and 5.25” floppy disks. A little later, we also had some “super computers” in the art dept. that could do rudimentary 3D. It was a custom OS, and equally terse. All things pointed to macs really being for “the rest of us”. My friend Jerry got a job at Software Etc and bought himself a Mac and would bring home software. I used to go over there and play with MacPaint. Again, really exciting for the time.
Ever since then, I’ve been in the Mac cult. I’ve had many friends pass thru the fruit factory. I applied multiple times over the years and didn’t make the cut, and so have been Apple adjacent in my career. ComputerWare, Sixty-Eight Thousand/ARRISystems, and Aladdin/Allume/Smith Micro. I finally joined the fold and in July, it will have been 10 years. I don’t know what my life would have been like if there was no Macintosh.
For whatever faults they have, as a corporation, they at least try do do good things. I hope that continues.
Thanks Apple.
—tg
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HBD, Fruit Company.
I've always been an Apple Stan. I wrote Pascal Programs on an Apple II at UCSB. My father bought me an Apple Mac 3 months after it was introduced. I think we even went to a hardware demonstration at a local computer store. It had a 128K of RAM on board. I later went to some guy in Palo Alto to swap out the chips and had 512K. I watched while he soldiered them onto the board. It's been downhill ever since. I still have a Mac Plus in the closet that I used while I lived in Daly City at the missing house.
As a matter of fact, my anger does keep me warm
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I’m a Luddite. I like Apple.
In the Tudor Period, Fencing Masters were classified in the Vagrancy Laws along with Actors, Gypsys, Vagabonds, Sturdy Rogues, and the owners of performing bears.
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I like my iPhone. Stacy and Tara have Mac products. I used Stacy's Mac for a few years, until I got my chromebook. I'm a PC guy. It's just how I was raised, plus my main axe is MS Word, which has never performed very well on Macs.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse
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04-03-2021, 08:22 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-03-2021, 08:23 AM by King Bob.)
We've been all Apple for a long time. Partly because I use them in academia, and also because Christina is bad with computers and never could get the hang of a PC. And iPhones are so nice, especially since they introduced the cheaper SE model - I can carry all my music in my pocket and the drive still isn't full.
I remember when I was at Santa Clara, they had gotten Macs in the art department. I looked at what people were doing with them, and it was so simplistic and crude that I thought they were idiots. Clearly I had no vision on that one.
the hands that guide me are invisible
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When I worked at svale public library, I was part of a crew that oversaw the media center. We rented out VHS, vinyl and CDs, which were new then and I was the only person on staff that owned a CD player. We also monitored the computers. I was also the only person who knew how to repair vhs cassettes - one of my many obsolete skills like swordsmanship. We had 3 - an apple, a PC and a commodore. There was always a huge queue for the Apple.
When I got to SJSU, I made some pin money making graphs. Psych papers always needed graphs and I could handle letraset. But by my senior year, the psych dept got a few puters for students to rent and that market dried up fast. Making graphs on an apple was so quick, even in the early days.
I get frustrated with macs because I can’t control/alt/delete or get at the code sometimes.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse
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DM reminds me that the big weakness of Apple is in key shortcuts. I used to notice it a lot in Word and Excel. On a PC you can do a lot of things without taking your hands off the keyboard, but in Apple you have to use the mouse. And there doesn't really seem to be any reason why they couldn't handle the same shortcuts.
DM also reminds me that I love the library. And the San Jose library system is still buying CDs and I check them out often. I have several on request right now.
the hands that guide me are invisible
![[Image: p052b126.jpg]](https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p052b126.jpg)