I joined the cult in 1984.
I was excited to work on Gladys’s New Shoes because I’d been in the cult already for 20 years. I saw the super bowl commercial like millions of others, and then I got to touch one in person. I was hooked.
The look, smell, feel of the keys, and this new-fangled thing called a mouse. It was magical.
In high school in 1984, the Mac was a cool and interesting curiosity kept at arm’s length because I didn’t have one. But Penn State changed all that.
At Penn State, we had rooms full of Macintosh SE’s stationed throughout the campus. Rooms full of IBM PCs also existed, but the Mac labs were for the cool kids. Who in their right mind would want to use some ugly greyish, multi-box, wires-everywhere, DOS-based PC over the slick point-and-click beauty of the Mac SE?
“Hey man, we got a paper due tomorrow. I’m heading to the Willard Lab to get in line. You comin?”
I was on team Steve. I grumbled when he got fired, monkeyed around with NeXT, and cheered when he came back.
As I jumped into the New Shoes project, my favorite Mac of all time was sitting in my kitchen (yes, the kitchen) — the iMac G4, looking like a desk lamp with a beautiful 15″ flat-panel display and ice-white hemispherical base. It was a beautiful addition to the kitchen decor.
Then came the iPod. Like with the first Mac I touched, it instantly hooked me. When I held that smooth, shiny deck of cards and spun the click-wheel under my thumb, I knew this was my thing. I bought one as a “gift for my wife.” Wink, wink.
And now I was lucky enough to be working on the next generation.
