Throughout the course of my career I have done my best to stay on top of new hardware and software. As a teenager I owned an Altair 8800 and an Apple II. In my first year of college someone gave me a phone number and said “call this with modem.” I did, it answered “PENTAGON TIP,” and I had access to ARPANET!
I followed the emerging PC industry with great interest, voraciously reading every new issue of Byte, InfoWorld, and several other long-gone publications. In early 1983, rumor had it that Apple Computer would soon introduce a new system that was affordable, compact, self-contained, and very easy to use. Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh in January 1984 and my employer ordered several right away, along with a pair of the Apple Lisa systems that were used as cross-development hosts. As a developer, I was attracted to the Mac’s rich collection of built-in APIs and services, and still treasure my phone book edition of the Inside Macintosh documentation!
