On the 30th anniversary of the launch of Macintosh, I’d like to share a couple of memories with my friends.
The first people I knew who had a Mac in their house were Rob Nardone, Andy Nardone, and their parents. In 1984, the three of us used that Mac to create some primitive graphics that appeared in various places in and around Chatham Township High School.
When I went to RPI, the Mac community was very small and only people who had a bit of a counter-cultural streak had Macs. I convinced the RPI Hockey Team to buy one, with a LaserWriter, for communications purposes. I spent some time teaching the late Nancy McGrath how to use it.
Martin O’Donnell, the best man at our wedding, had a Macintosh II at RPI when I first met him in about 1988. I think this was the first Mac with a horizontal desktop case. He has been at least a small part of every one of my business ventures since then.
Guy Kawasaki gave me a huge break and helped me get into Macintosh database consulting in 1989. He gave me some frequent flyer miles so I could afford to come to MacWorld when I was still an RPI student. At MacWorld I met the other members of the 4th Dimension developer community. I think my RPI classmate Russ Woodbridge was out there with me.
Peter Plaut and his father David are also pretty aware of what I was trying to do back then, at the time that I founded my first company. David’s company GCF has been a customer of my companies for about 25 years.
The first Macintosh that I considered truly mine was a Macintosh IIci that my first company CTDATA bought after we got angel funding in 1989. I later purchased a classic Mac, probably a Macintosh SE, which I still have in an original Mac carrying case in the basement of my house.
Peter Frank, my friend who passed away in 2003, was the person who epitomized bleeding six colors. He was the only person I ever knew well who bought a 20th Anniversary Macintosh. That was an incredible machine and he deserved it. (BTW, It’s called a 20th Anniversary Macintosh because it was created for the 20th anniversary of Apple, not the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh itself.)
My wife Kathleen and I met when we both worked at J.P. Morgan in 1994. We were both working for the Emerging Markets business unit, which was the only part of Morgan that used Macs as desktop computers and as part of bond and derivative traders’ workstations.
In the past 10 years, Kathleen and I have acquired six Macintosh computers, three iPads, and seven different iPhones. I don’t think our sons Jimmy and Peter have used any other brand of computer, mobile phone, or tablet.