HBD Apple

[thatguy]

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