OT: Apple at 30 - My Piece of the Big Fruit

[Judy Perry]

Oh yeah!

I felt the exact same way.  While everybody knows that I am certainly not
a geek by even the most generous stretch of the definition, I had used and
played around with DOS-based PCs, the Commodore64 (using the word
processing app PaperClip -- anybody remember it?  You could have 3 sizes
of type, styles included bold, italic and underline, and, this is where I
felt like I had died and gone to heaven, you could JUSTIFY type along
your defined line-length!!! and xeroxing the resulting dot-matrix
printout made your pasted page layout look downright decent) and the
Timex Sinclair.  I could fiddle with Basic, do file/directory
manipulation in DOS, but, man, a  MOUSE?!?!?? and pretty little pictures
(that were intuitive) I could click on and feel free to experiment and
use as opposed to being terrified I'd do something incredibly stupid like
inadvertently erase DOS on my employer's machine (yup, did that. thank
the deities for the manuals he had handy, I reinstalled that little sucker
before he ever got back)...

Yeah, no... no looking back. I remember telling my fiance at the time.  We
were pooling resources and purchasing for the future.  We both agreed we
needed to make computer ownership a priority.  He wanted to buy a DOS
machine.

I told him, sure, honey... but I'm saving my money and will be buying a
Mac as soon as I can afford one.

After much grousing, he went along with me... and has never looked back.

And then I saw a Newton...

Judy

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Dennis Brown wrote:

> A few years later (1984-5) and the Mac arrived.  I saw one at the
> local PC store.  I said, "This is the future of user interfaces, and
> I am getting on board now".