The events of this week have caused me to pause and reflect on my experiences with Apple: not only as an employee there for almost sixteen years, but as someone that has had both a professional and personal relationship with their products.

My Junior year in High School I took Computer Science 1 as one of my elective classes. The teacher told us that first day that, by way of class supplies, we would need to purchase a box of blank punch cards. We were going to learn Fortran.

A week into the class, I walked in one day to find the school had purchased 16 or so Apple ][ computers. The teacher explained that in fact we now needed to purchase something called a floppy disk. We were going to learn BASIC instead.

So I learned how to plot pixels, do simple animation, on an Apple computer.

Apple’s products were always out of my price range though so it wasn’t until college (and a student loan plus discount) before I owned my own Apple computer. But this was 1986 so it was a Macintosh Plus (seen above). I believe I paid $1200 for it.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, that Mac Plus (and a used copy of Turbo Pascal I had bought from a professor) essentially began my professional career.

For what it’s worth, the degree I completed in college was in Education not, as you might have guessed, Computer Science. By all accounts I should have gone on to teach high school but that little beige box changed the course of my life.

Apple didn’t simply make over-priced computing machines; for me Apple have always been tool makers — making tools of the finest quality and with the love of a craftsman.

From the point of view of a software engineer, it’s curious though how the machine is both the tool and the canvas —

The display on the Mac Plus was so crisp that I couldn’t wait to see a bitmap I had drawn in MacPaint move across it in a game. It was like magic. I didn’t want to program for any other machine.

And using the machine itself to create the art, record the sounds, compose the music, type the programming code, compile.... A pleasure to use.

If you imagine a wood carver or an artist who treasures their tools: their well-honed chisels, fine camel-hair brushes ... Apple’s products have been like that for me. To be sure, the tools have changed over time – have evolved. And yet I’m still here using the latest of them.