When I was a kid, I used to stare at the Apple logo on my sister’s hand-me-down Macintosh LCII and dream about the future. That half-bitten apple was a symbol, a vision of a different world: a world where renegades and upstarts took crazy ideas and turned them into reality.
Here’s some non-prank related stuff you should read. The Verge staff put together Apple thoughts and memories, and I wanted to share my own.
The first time I used an Apple computer was in elementary school and in the library. But it was already an old computer and my brain always translated Apple to be synonymous with “outdated”. It was probably an Apple II, but I can’t be sure. Our first home computer was a Compaq running Windows 3.1 and that felt so much more like the future to me. 3.1 begat 95, 95 begat 98, and to me that was what a computer was.
When I went to college I went without a computer, something that was probably not smart in 2002 but was still doable… probably the last year it was doable. I went because I wanted to see what computers were in the labs at school. I was going for filmmaking and I wanted to buy a computer that I could use to edit.
So, after two weeks of classes, I hesitantly bought my first Mac. It was a 2002 PowerMac G4 with 60GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. I didn’t think I was going to like it, and I was right.
I loved it.
OS X was a dream and it felt like the future. And it was fast. I never had a fast computer before. I never needed one. And now that I had one, I wasn’t going back.
I had that tower until 2009 (upgrading a few times along the way) and I can’t imagine having a computer made by someone else. Do I like a lot of the things that Windows 10 is doing? Yes. It’s kind of rad. But I just cannot imagine getting any work done without a Mac.
Happy Birthday, Apple.
