Without the Mac, I wouldn’t have had a career.
The first time I encountered a Mac was in 1986. As a fresh-faced know-it-all Humanities student, I had use of the computer lab at Hatfield Polytechnic. Although I (like everyone) had an account on the VMS computer, I was much more drawn to the ten or so strange boxy all-in-one computers arranged against one wall.
The Mac, so my computer scientist hall mates told me, was something pretty special. They were also the people who, once I requested and got an account on the college Unix machine, thought it was hilarious to hack it and give me root access— but that’s another story.
Over the next couple of years, the Mac and me became firm friends. I can still do a pretty good impersonation of the sound that the floppy drive made when you ejected a disk. You heard that a lot because the computer had a single drive and so you spent a lot of time swapping disks around. I remember getting a pirated copy of WriteNow when it was released, and how amazingly fast it was compared to MacWrite.
When I graduated in 1989, I already knew I would be going back to do a PhD, but spent a year working at Apple in Information Systems and Technology, AKA IS&T, as a desktop support assistant. This was possibly the easiest technical job in the world because around 95% of all problems could be resolved in one of two ways: reinstalling the system, or replacing the motherboard. And as the spares warehouse was downstairs, motherboards were not in short supply. I have no idea what the stock control system was, but I never encountered it.
I could write a whole article about that year. About the fantastic community of nerds that you could tap into via AppleLink, the internal email system and proto-internet which also linked Apple to its dealers, and which ultimately became America Online. About dropping the only Mac Portable in the UK from a height of around two metres while the hard drive was spinning – and it surviving without a scratch (that machine was tough). About having an alpha release of System 7, which was still known as Blue, and installing it on a machine just to see what it looked like (slow, buggy and disappointing was the answer).
But the most important thing about that year was that it gave my my first Mac: a Mac Plus, with a 20Mb external hard drive, a second 20Mb external SCSI drive, and an ImageWriter II printer. I (ahem) “borrowed” some extra SIMMs to take it up to the full 4Mb of memory, and wrote half a thesis on that.
The other half got written on my next Mac: an LC 475 AKA Performa 475 AKA Quadra 605. By that point, I was teaching as well as studying, and the extra money I made paid for a much-needed new Mac. The Mac Plus, which was eight years old, really wasn’t keeping up with my wide range of pirated software. Most importantly, it couldn’t play Arkanoid in colour.
By the end of that year I needed a job, and like every Humanities graduate, I looked to the Wednesday edition of The Guardian to provide. That was when the media jobs were advertised, and I applied for a job on MacUser.
I knew nothing about journalism — I had never aspired to be one, and it probably took me another two years before I could describe myself as one without embarrassment. Given that my job mostly involved calling PRs to get equipment to test in the labs, unboxing said equipment, and working with a succession of real journalists to devise ever more fiendish ways to prove that Printer X was better than Printer Y, my reluctance was probably justified.
Six years later, I was editing the magazine. A title so profitable that it built Felix Dennis several houses, and provided the money to launch Maxim, which took Felix from “rich” to “seriously rich” when he sold it. I have a story about the sale of Maxim in the US which is funny, full of swearing, shows how much luck Felix had, and is completely unrepeatable.
Being editor of MacUser was serious. You got invited to a ludicrous number of swanky events, got to be a D&AD judge, and won many awards. Apple was on its uppers, but MacUser was thriving. I sometimes think that the better MacUser did the worse Apple went, and certainly Apple’s revival under Steve Jobs coincided with the slow demise of the Mac titles. I don’t think it was his fault: at that point, this weird internet thing was beginning to gut advertising revenues. But you never know…
Since I left MacUser I’ve worked for other magazines, other publishers, clients and friends on brands as diverse as The Week, Grazia, heat (yes, it is lower case) and Motorcycle News. I made a brief return to full-time tech journalism at Dennis in the mid ‘10s, and had another ball, but technology journalism has moved on a lot and I don’t think it’s as much fun as it was (the parties… well, they’re not as spectacular. One day, I’ll write up the story of the launch of A Very Major Product which… let’s draw a curtain over that).
But: without the Mac, without that odd little box I encountered in a computer lab in 1986, I wouldn’t have had the career I have had. Who knows what I would have done? Most of my friends spent a chunk of the 90s working in record shops, while I was getting flown around the world. And I don’t think I had their level of ambition.
So, thanks, Apple. Thanks for my career. Thanks for 40 years of fun, bitching about bad designs, purring over good designs, plastic, polycarbonate, aluminium, aloooominum, titanium, and whatever quantum material the Cube was made from. Thanks for the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro that’s currently warming my legs, and for the ridiculously long battery life on the M2 MacBook Air.
Thanks to Susan Kare for the most playful icons in the world. And thanks to Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfeld and all the wizards who stayed up late at night to fit a GUI into 64Kb of ROM and 128Kb of RAM.
