My relationship with Apple, and by extension with the Steves, has shaped my entire adult life. I am not a super nerd, hype addict that absolutely needs the newest, greatest thing on the market (at least not any longer…), but have been a customer and an affiliate of the Apple ecosystem for most of the past 30 years.
My journey along the Apple path began as a senior in college back in the mid-1980s when my university declared that all incoming freshman would start their matriculation accompanied by the newly announced Macintosh. These strange little machines were still very interesting even for someone who had started his own freshman year with punch cards, Fortran and timeshared mainframes.
When I graduated in 1984, I was recruited to work on the 386 at Intel as a product engineer at an office not far from Apple HQ. The Mac was not welcome at Intel, as it ran on a Motorola 68xx processor, but it would not be long before I was back on a Mac keyboard.
I was lucky to continue my learning path with engineering classes at Stanford and my computer graphics class was based on the Lisa, the Mac’s big sister and market failed predecessor. Before long, I found the only Mac at Intel, owned by the head of the graphics co-processor group there, and his generosity in letting us use it saved us a trip to Stanford a few times per week. I remember many late nights and weekends (we couldn’t use it while its owner was working during the day).
The original Mac was slow, had a small screen, not much memory and only a single floppy drive; there was no hard drive. How frustrating was it for me and my colleague to be swapping the Pascal compiler disc in and out while we tried to save our programs to another disc…
Not much later, my colleague, Clay, found a friend at his church who’s design firm had built the original optical mouse and soon we were using his borrowed machine on my fireplace or Clay’s kitchen island. The clear Plexiglas prototype compelled me to get out of the chip business and back to the systems that they were built upon…
In 1987, I started working at Ampex at the beginning of the revolution from all analog to all digital audio-video systems; more on that later. In late 1988 we started to contemplate a new video editing system that would break the price and performance barriers that the single function $100k boxes that were being sold at the time by Ampex and our competitors. By the time of the Loma Prieta earthquake less than a year later, we had built the innards of that editing system, Tatakna, and it was fronted by the then reigning PowerMac. Tatakna never made it to market due to internal decisions at Ampex, but that team was one of the best and tightest design teams that I ever worked with.
When I left Ampex in 1990, I joined RasterOps, a young, newly public company that was an Apple “sister” company. These sister companies helped make the Macintosh ecosystem more complete (and before Apple would integrate these new features into their next platform turn or software revision). At RasterOps, we had to hack the operating system to get out initial video capture cards to work, but eventually, we partnered with the Apple advanced technology software team to help create QuickTime 1.0 on top of our hardware. We went on to build video accelerators, video compression systems, CMYK framebuffers, color laser printers and monitors for the Mac and we were happy enough for Apple to eat our young along the way.
At the behest of the VP of engineering and co-founder of RasterOps, I started consulting with RasterOps customers that were integrating our boards (and by extension, the Mac) into their own specialized systems. By late 1992, I was recruited by an early Mac evangelist, Trip Hawkins, to join his post-Electronic Arts start-up 3DO. Again, at our core, we developed a lot of our software, graphics, and early games on the Mac and most of ran the business side of our lives on the Mac…
Back to the personal side of life, my wife “retired” from Intel shortly after the birth of our first daughter. She wanted to have a home business to help finance some of the risk of my startup proclivity (I held my RasterOps stock a bit too long and lost money, but “diversified” a bit while at 3DO and socked a bit away…) and while speaking with a fellow new mom, she launched her medical transcription business on my old PowerMac, a RasterOps big-screen and an Apple laser printer. How cool is that?
As my daughters grew into toddlers, they wanted to sit on our laps and grab the mouse so that they could be like us; soon they were playing games and drawing on that very intuitive platform. By 1997, I was able to help their elementary school get their T1 line up and running and their first computer lab running. Of course, that lab was populated by the new colorful iMacs (courtesy of the other Steve, Woz). We were blessed by that early generosity and a few years later, the fourth graders were getting MacBooks upon entry to populate the middle school and the younger grades had access via portable laptop pods. These kids were doing multimedia projects and group assignments from day one.
Even though I had various versions of iPods around the house, I was still jealous of my kids as they both had Mac laptops and I was stuck on a PC (PwC centered all communications on Lotus notes), but I have now been able to get back to my roots and have a MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad to run my business. As I mentioned, my adult life has been shaped by Apple and Steve’s genius and products; I’d go a bit further and say that my life, both personal and professional, would not be what they are today without their contributions. For all of that, I am extremely grateful.
It is a bit ironic to be sitting and writing this whilst I listen to one of Steve’s original Mac evangelists, Guy Kawasaki, speak about the “12 lessons that I learned from Steve” and I will add a link to it once he puts it up. It all comes full circle…
PS: Guy's video is posted here; let me know if how you like it.
