As the holidays approach, I think back to all of the Christmases in my life that have involved electronics. The Pong game back in 1976. The Fairchild gaming system (the first one with cartridges!) in 1978. The Atari 2600 in 1979. The Compucolor II by Intecolor in 1981. There was an “Adam” in there somewhere. Our parents, especially Mom, loved electronics and computers, and wanted their three boys to be geeks long before it was chic.
Well, I don’t know. Is it chic yet?
A major turning point was in 1985, when my brother Michael, who was working at a computer store while attending college, received a christmas bonus for his sales that year. With it, he bought (and brought home to the family) our first Macintosh.
He had already purchased his own shortly after its release in 1984, so he left this one with us. That was my senior year in high school, and I used this computer to write my class papers, something that pleased all the teachers who had struggled to read my “doctor’s” handwriting, or suffered through typewritten pages covered in “Wite-Out”. We found some odd little games to play on it. Did some black and white artwork on it. I loved it.
Since then, I’ve had only Macs. LCII, Quadra, PowerPC — I haven’t committed to memory all of the models I’ve used. That’s something I believe a lot of people do simply to impress others and not because they actually really owned those computers. I could pick mine out of a line up, and that’s all I care about. Given Apple’s market share in those days (late ’80s, early ’90s), I find it amusing how many people now seem to say they were early Apple fans.
We had a Miles Davis “Think Different” poster on our office wall, sure, but even before Steve came back, all through Apple’s “dark ages”, we were using and collecting all things Mac: Stickers. Pins. Our contract and non-disclosure agreement for beta testing QuickTime 1.6 in 1993, when we were a multimedia CD-ROM production company. The “25,000,000″ pin from MacWorld in 1996. Here’s one of my favorites:
Yes, we love Apple long time.
I don’t know what year that T-shirt is from because I can’t even find another one when I Google it.
I’m rambling. I guess you can do that with a blog, right? Especially when you only make an entry every month or so?
My point is: Sure, it’s cool that our company has Apple certifications in OS X client, OS X Server and iOS devices such as iPhone and iPad. Yes, we know about iCloud and every version of the OS from System 7 (remember the Chooser?) through Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. It’s great that our three technicians have been “sanctioned” by Apple because we’ve studied hard, taken official Apple training courses and passed our tests. But to me, what makes Technology Pros truly special is that we’ve lived and breathed Apple pretty much since the beginning.
So here I sit near the end of 2011, and I reflect on the years of Macintosh desktops, laptops, servers, towers, Apple color printers, Airports (both Extreme and Express), iPhones, iPads, iMacs and more.
And I wonder what’s next? What will be in my stocking in 2012? 2015? 2020?
Whatever it is, rest assured we will learn all about it so that we can help you with it, too.
Original Apple Logo Pin