Jon Brodkin, Senior IT Reporter
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When I saw the news that Steve Jobs had died, my first thought was the terrible loss the technology world has suffered. My second thought brought me back to 1984 (give or take), when I was about 5 years old and my parents bought an Apple IIe. It was the first computer I ever used.
Even as a child, I knew there was something fundamentally new and exciting going on, that this was a step forward in human capability. At the very least, typewriters suddenly were archaic. Over the years, I used our first computer to write reports for school (sometimes) but spent many more hours playing games like Montezuma's Revenge, Sherwood Forest, The Oregon Trail and Conan: Hall of Volta. I got lost in those games, and the keyboard picked up new specks of dirt with each passing month. My mother tells me we got the computer through a program called Apple for the Teacher, and it cost $2,000 even though she got a slight discount as a member of the School Committee. It was our family's primary computer for at least five years. We used floppy disks to load software and save files, and sometimes when I was bored of video games I played another game called 'see if you can destroy a floppy disk.'
Later, our first Internet-enabled PCs ran MS-DOS and Windows, and the most exciting technology for me was Nintendo and the Game Boy. Apple didn't have Mario. But Apple is the company that introduced me to computers, which have made so much of my own life possible. As a student and young adult I spent 20 years using Windows PCs, yet Apple creeped back into my life in 2004 when I bought my first iPod. I still use that iPod nearly every day, and its enduring nature and simplicity of use led me to several more Apple purchases, including an iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. As an occasional history buff, I marvel at the impact Jobs and his competitor Bill Gates had on my life and the lives of so many others. But mostly, I remember what it was like when I first used an Apple computer.
I asked my colleagues at Ars Technica to share recollections of their first experiences with Apple technology. Here's what they have to say.
Jacqui Cheng, Senior Apple Editor
My first Mac was also my first computer: my mother's Mac SE, which I began using in the late 1980s and was eventually gifted to me a few years later when she upgraded to a newer, fancier Mac. I was in grade school and the appeal of manipulating what were then the coolest computer-generated graphics around was irresistible. I instantly became addicted—both to computers and to the Mac itself—and became a lifelong user.
In high school, I owned a Motorola StarMax Mac clone (before Steve Jobs shut the clone program down, of course), and in college, I progressed through the ownership of a blue and white G3 tower, a tangerine iBook, and a titanium PowerBook G4. I was also a member of the Purdue University Mac Users Group (shout out to all my PUMUG peeps who are Ars readers today!), where I eventually became secretary and helped to lead the group into the new era of Mac OS X. But I was never the aggressive, trollish, converting type—my approach was always one of love and tolerance of our PC-using friends (I did learn how to program on a PC, after all). I made many lifelong friends because of our collective Mac-and-PC-loving nerdery.
Being a Mac user is what brought me to Ars Technica. I came to this site as a humble community member in 2001 when Ars opened its first Mac forum. I began writing for the Apple section of the site in 2005 thanks to that first Mac, and became editor in 2006. Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Mac helped steer me down the path to where I am today, and for that, I will always be grateful.
Dave Girard, Contributing Writer
The first time I used an Apple computer was when my mother was an elementary school teacher and, while she worked late at her desk, I sat in the computer room at her school playing Moon Patrol on what I think was an Apple II. To this day, I can still remember the strange resilience of 5.25' floppies and I don't know that I forgive Steve for taking them away from me.
Eric Bangeman, Managing Editor
Apple and I go way back. I cut my computing teeth on one of the ten or so Ohio Scientific Challenger 2Ps in my high school computer lab in 1980. They didn't last long. It wasn't long before the large blue OSI metal boxes, 9' black-and-white TVs, and cassette players were gone, replaced by a room full of Apple ][+ computers. I spent many an hour bathed by the glow of the green, monochrome monitors in the lab, and upon graduation, knew I needed one to take to college. My best friend (and college-roommate-to-be) and I pooled our graduation money and summer job earnings and headed off to suburban Minneapolis in the late summer of 1984 with a brand-new Apple //e. We pimped it out as best we could within our $2,000 budget, which meant a single floppy drive, monochrome monitor, ImageWriter dot-matrix printer, and an 80-column card. It was the bomb, especially since we were the only students on our tiny college campus with a computer.
Needless to say, the //e got a lot of use. There were papers to type (and with my mad typing skills, I soon had a decent business typing term papers for others), programs to write, and, most importantly, games to play. While the //e was by no stretch of the imagination a paragon of brilliant industrial design, the hardware and software melded in a way that made using it satisfying. Fuel hungry mac os. I had a fair amount of experience with other PCs of the era—TI-99/4A, TRS-80, Commodore 64—and the Apple was by far the most enjoyable to use.
Before my sophomore year I got a job setting up the college's first computer lab. The boxes that greeted me early one August morning contained a multitude of IBM clones, keyboards, and monitors, but there was one box that stood out. It was a single 128K Macintosh. The sleek design (compared to the beige IBM boxes), built-in black-and-white monitor, and mouse intrigued me. I set all of the computers up and got them all running, but I found myself returning to the Mac time and time again. The user interface was light years ahead of what the PCs in the room offered, and typing papers in MacWrite and actually seeing what the page would look like before printing was just amazing. I even ditched my //e to do as much of my computing as possible on the Macintosh.
AdvertisementAfter college, I used my roommate's Mac Classic. When I finally bought my next computer several years later, it was a Mac (a PowerBook 165), as has every computer I have purchased since that I have not built myself. Good hardware and operating systems should be celebrated no matter what the platform, and I appreciate the innovations that have come from different manufacturers. But the Mac and the operating systems they have run have always felt like home, and that's why I've been using them for 26 years.
John Timmer, Science Editor
Like many others, I became aware of Apple computers thanks to the Apple II, which a number of my friends owned. By that time, however, I had already committed to a Commodore 64, which helped get me through high school and college. It was clearly past its time by graduation, and I headed off to graduate school without a computer. The lab I worked in was an Apple shop (as many biology labs were), so I had my first extended experience with the Mac on a IIci there.
About halfway through graduate school, someone realized that the terms of our funding required that it be paid back if we didn't continue on in research, which technically made it a loan. This set off a rush of amended tax returns as we all frantically tried to claim retroactive refunds. Most of these claims were arbitrarily rejected, but I was one of the lucky few: three years of back taxes, refunded all at once. Shortly afterwards, one of the just-released PowerMacs, a bottom-of-the-line 6100, was mine (I also bought a wetsuit so I could go windsurfing in San Francisco Bay and some parts for my bike).
Over the years, I added RAM, a bigger hard drive, a video card that could handle a 17' monitor, overclocked it, and subjected it to all sorts of abuse, not the least of which involved typing my thesis on it. As Apple looked to be going under, I experimented with putting a Mach-based version of Linux on it (that didn't last). The hardware itself never caused a hiccup, but eventually was simply too slow to handle the sorts of things my research career was requiring me to do, so it was eventually retired in favor of a G3. A few years later, it experienced a resurgence when my mom decided she wanted to learn to use a computer. That time, it was replaced by a second generation iMac, and ended up being recycled.
I can't say Apple inspired a lifetime love of computers and technology in me—I had those long before I bought my first Mac. But it was the first computer that I really had ownership of. It was easy to open up, and I really took advantage of that to mess around with the hardware. In comparison, the Commodore 64 was a black box to me. Despite Apple's reputation for building a closed system, the 6100 helped me appreciate that computers really were tools that even a klutz like me could open up and tweak to better fit my needs. I now use laptops and do my tweaking via software, but it's a sense that hasn't left me.
Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor
I was taught how to do very basic programming on an Apple II and created a very primitive video game in a technology class when I was a child. This taught me two things: I wasn't interested in making my own games, and video games came from people. Growing up, I thought they just appeared in the stores somehow, and it didn't occur to me that actual people used actual skills and talent to create the games I played.
Steve Jobs always seemed famously uninterested in video games, and his apathy led indirectly to the creation of Electronic Arts. That being said, he's done more to democratize video game creation and sales than anyone who isn't named Gabe Newell. In many ways the iPhone and iPad are ideal to play games, and anyone with a computer and a little bit of money can create their own games and sell them directly to gamers. The touch screen took the complexity out of modern controllers so anyone could play, and Apple took down many of the walls that stand between hobby developers and the audience they wish to reach.
Steve Jobs started Apple in a garage, and it's perhaps fitting that he helped others who were working in their figurative—and sometimes literal—garages. Gaming on Apple's portable devices is huge, and the market has been home to a number of creative and cultural tidal waves. Apple has changed the state of the art for computers, for music, for movies, and also for games. I've spent many a wonderful evening with my iPad and a great game, headphones covering my ears, completely lost in the experience.
Aurich Lawson, Creative Director
The Macintosh wasn't the first computer I used, or even the first one by Apple, but it was the first one that truly mattered. I was six years old when we bought the original Macintosh 128K, and MacPaint was a revelatory experience. With nothing but a black-and-white screen and a size that seems comically small by today's standards, I was pushing pixels on a virtual canvas with a mouse, absolutely captivated. I would spend hours drawing, iterating, and utterly lost in a world of my own making. On a basic and primal level there isn't much difference between what I did in MacPaint as a child, and what I do now in Photoshop.
It's not hyperbole to say my life wouldn't be the same without visionaries like Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and Bill Atkinson. Computers are just tools, the 'creative people use Macs' canard is ridiculous, but the Macintosh is my tool. With it I connected to the world with my first 1200-baud modem, created art both personal and commercial, produced music and started a record label, and found a career that lets me do what I love with an amazing group of people.
I was surprised how strong my reaction to the news of Steve's passing hit me. But after reflecting on how much the man has meant to me for almost my entire life, in so many ways that fundamentally matter to me I realized it was the only natural reaction. He changed the world. We're all living in a better one because of him, I truly believe that. I know my life wouldn't be the same without his vision.
AdvertisementChris Foresman, Contributing Writer
My first memory of using Apple computers was from around 1981. I was a kindergartener at Riverside Elementary School in Altamonte Springs, Florida. In addition to having the benefit of being able to watch pretty much every Space Shuttle launch by walking out into the playground and looking roughly south and west, we also had the luxury of having about a dozen Apple IIs stuffed into a tiny room in the corner of the school's library.
Occasionally, I was able to go to the library to play Math Blaster. I remember watching the animated 'aliens' dancing around the monochromatic green phosphor screen with simple addition or subtraction problems on them. Typing in the correct answer would 'blast' them to smithereens and save the planet. Imagine—saving the world with math! Master telegrapher mac os.
Later I would use Apple IIs to learn BASIC programing, make fake newspapers and crazy banners using PrintShop, and play hours and hours of Laser Chess and Oregon Trail. In junior high I learned how to generate graphics using Logo, and then how to program more advanced graphics using PEEK and POKE commands to send data to specific registers.
In high school, I learned very rudimentary computer-aided design using an Apple II in a drafting course. But I got my first chance to use a Mac in electronics and graphics design courses taught by the same instructor. That teacher had a Mac SE in his room, and when we weren't using it to play Sim City, we were learning Freehand and Quark on its tiny 9' black and white screen. We would even use Freehand to draw out circuits by copying and pasting pre-drawn symbols and drawing lines to connect them.
Though I've also used TRS-80s, Ataris, Amigas, Sparcs, and yes, even DOS and Windows PCs over the years, I've never stopped using Apple products.
Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor
There and back again
I learned to program on an Apple II, my very first computer. I have fond memories of many afternoons and late evenings spent typing BASIC code into the ProDOS line editor. I started my journey by typing in code from books. I would painstakingly double-check every line to make sure I got it all right.
Tenacity and fascination with the machine carried me through the painful early steps, but my chief motivation became passion when I finally learned enough to write my own code from scratch. I made games, tools, and even a little bit of low-resolution art. The Apple II opened my mind to the creative potential of technology and the empowering joy of software development.
I learned to program on that Apple II at the same age that I discovered Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, one of the other powerful influences of my youth. The story filled me with the same sense of awe and wonder that I had found in code. At a young age, I thought that the computer was the closest thing to true magic that had ever existed in our world. Like Bilbo's unexpected party, my discovery of the Apple II was the start of a magical adventure that transformed my life and changed everything I had ever known into something infinitely greater.
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Years later, when Steve Jobs described the iPad as a 'magical' device, I snorted incredulously. As a jaded technologist, almost nothing seems magical to me anymore. But then I began to remember my childhood and the simple magic that I had discovered in the Apple II. The secret ingredient behind Apple's greatness is its enduring belief in magic: the conviction that great things can inspire awe and change the world for the better.
In Tolkien's world, wizards are wise, powerful, and farseeing. They are subtle and quick to anger, attentive to the smallest of details, and capable of seeing greatness in the humblest of hobbits. They are fallible, but also fearless—even when confronted with seemingly certain defeat. There are very few people in the age of man that deserve to be called wizards, but Steve Jobs is one of them.
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I went through several boxed sets of Lord of the Rings over the years, reading them with love until they fall apart. My Apple II has fared better—it is still fully functional after all this time. I kept it as a memento of the challenges I overcame when I learned to program. But after Steve's words encouraged me to think about the joy that the Apple II brought me in my childhood, it has become a much more powerful symbol. It is the light that holds back the bitter cynicism that I've accumulated with age. It reminds me that magic still exists, as long as we believe.
Although the iPad has brought magic to many, I have found it to be decidedly less magical than my Apple II. I am deeply grateful to Steve Jobs and in awe of Apple's tremendous achievements, but the company's increasingly restrictive application policies on mobile devices—which prohibit the use of child-friendly programming environments such as Scratch—might prevent the next generation of young technologists from experiencing the same joy that I discovered when I learned to program on the Apple II. Steve Jobs was a great man who has left behind a powerful legacy. I hope that the company he created will honor his legacy by eventually righting this one wrong that he didn't find time to rectify during his lifetime.
Casey Johnston, Associate Writer
My first experience with Apple, like so many of my generation without Apple nerd parents, was with an iPod. I bought my third-generation iPod with money earned from an after-school job at a grocery store, and proceeded to stuff it with music and keep my earbuds in between classes as long as possible (this pre-dated the hoodie trick).
Since the first candy-colored iMacs and iBooks appeared in ads and my school's computer lab when I was ten, I'd envied their design over my beige computer tower. I buried this admiration in snide comments about the computers' hockey puck mice and quixotic error messages.
Freshman year of college, my only computer was a $1,000 Gateway laptop, a behemoth rivaled only in weight by its own power brick. When the Office trial ran out, the hard drive failed, and the screen began to flicker only a year after buying it, I fixed the hard drive, passed it on to my mom, and did a crazy thing only banks circa 2006 would let you do: I took out a small personal loan and bought one of the new white MacBooks.
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Digi destinies ver 0.3 mac os. I took my class notes in TextEdit, video chatted with my mom and boyfriend with the webcam, played copious amounts of World of Warcraft. Five and half years (and several repairs, thanks to the Apple Protection Plan) later, my MacBook still works. And as stupid as yet another loan is for a college student, to this day I don't regret a single payment.
Jonathan Gitlin, Contributing Writer
It would have been the late 1980s. My Dad's office was upgrading computers, and he brought home a IIe, and later a IIc, that weren't needed any more. I can still remember the IIc and its carrying handle; it took a while for Apple to get the concept of portable computers right, but boy did they ever. It really took off for me in 1989 though, when I moved to high school. Back then in the UK most schools used BBC Micro computers, but mine was equipped with a lab of Macintoshes, that we could use for everything from drawing chemical structures to making animated movies of stick figures skateboarding. From that point forward I knew there was Apple in my DNA.
