I’m really impressed with the credentials posted by everyone here; I thought we were just playing A/S/L; it’s super fun hearing about everyone’s history with Macs, tech, and life.
For me, I learned punchcards on mainframes and terminals in early grade school (starting in second grade) as part of an accelerated sciences program sponsored by local Boulder tech companies like IBM and NeoData; learned basic programming languages and “paper logic”.
(I hear you can make lower- to mid-six figure money these days if you can still speak and dream in COBOL for those insane banks that can’t let go and whose ITs are dying and retiring; it’s tempting).
In '77 I was invited to join the inaugural class of the IAAS (International Association for Astronomical Studies), and became an intern at the Boulder Valley Schools Public Planetarium where we (junior and senior high students) were tasked with refurbishing and expanding the neglected planetarium and creating additional science programs, along with creating our own study programs; we learned nearly every imaginable facet of practical and applied sciences in that spectrum (even some biology); built and created special effects; designed and built new observatories and telescopes, both optical and radio; wrote, produced and performed our own planetarium presentations; and then became responsible for teaching the newer members and outside classes. At 15, I was teaching freshman astronomy at CU’s Fiske Planetarium; that was a trip.
We got out first Apple ][ in early '78, and immediately put it to use as not only a study tool, but a show-runner for the planetarium; and we built some early astronomy programs, and later designed and built our own RS-23x serial devices, and attached them to telescopes in the observatories to auto-find objects.
The original Mac in late '84 and early '85, and then especially the 128K later revolutionized my college and university experience, opening up a world of writing I previously had little passion for; those same Macs, and then an SE opened my eyes to graphics work and desktop publishing; and became a key factor in enhancing the success of our family business(es; prototype and production machining and fabrication; automotive machining/remanufacturing/tool and die) – long live HyperCard.
The late 80’s brought on some early usenet access and BBS; I continued with the SE 30 when I shifted into teaching science through a non-profit I helped launch and served as CEO and Chairman in '91 through '06, creating our own early BBS for students and parents and teachers; continuing also to do everything that had come before, and more. We taught the kids with both DOS and later Windows, as well as Mac and *NIX, to program robots and such, burning their own EPROMS and making the robots follow their every command.
Our portable StarLab planetariums and Celestron telescopes were augmented with PowerBook Duos, 540s, 5300s, etc.
Somewhere in early '90s I discovered TidBits, but I can’t nail down the date without firing up an old SCSI hard drive in storage.
The first Mac that was truly my own personal beast was a PowerMac 7100, later upgraded with a G3-240 – what a screamer! I jumped headfirst into the exploding WWW when I got renal cancer and could no longer work on other people’s time tables; I self-taught everything Web, and built a business to pay to beat a six year battle with cancer in pure, hard-won cash sans insurance.
I quite literally would’ve been dead, but for the Mac, AppleScript, FileMaker, Lasso, Tango, GoLive CyberStudio (pre-Adobe) [EDIT: if I hadn’t been composing this in Discourse, I wouldn’t have sinned by leaving out:] BBEdit and WebObjects and CodeWarrior – long live C!; so I also became a dedicated (and sometimes paid) Mac Evangelist (starting unoffically before the 7100), and later worked for Apple both directly and indirectly.
If you look carefully, you can find my name in the About credits/thanks of a few now essentially extinct Adobe products, and a couple on Mac before that was banned/unfashionable; you might have used some of my subcontracted code in a few other popular specialty applications.
If you purchased Mac products at a couple well known online vendors in the late '90s/early '00s, you can thank me and my crew for it being a secure CC connection.
Also, if you’ve ever bought a charger, a cable, cellphone or an iPod or headphones or the like in an airport kiosk between Chicago and LA, I probably wrote a good chunk of that code, too.
That 7100 with a G3 (which I still have) gave way to a PowerMac G3 (which I still have); it was followed by numerous PowerMacs, PowerBooks, etc., but I hit a wall at the 2008 Mac Pro 3.2GHz 8-core with 64GB RAM. Heavily upgraded with a killer SSD RAID and fast video, and over 40TB of internal storage, it is still kicking butt at everything not single-threaded and modal (screw you, iTunes team).
Now fully eleven years old next month; I’m still waiting for Apple to build a Mac Pro as worthy and as capable as this one. I wanted to replace it in 2013, but, well, we all know the shape that story took.
I bought an iPod on day one, when no one understood what it was really for, and what it would become; I can’t claim I saw the whole future, but that there was a massive future in it was beyond obvious to me. That device alone, carried to all my client gigs, and used not only as a player, but to boot and repair the odd CEO’s secretary or graphics lead’s troubled Mac on a chance happening here and there, contributed effectively, if however small, to the halo effect. I (and my teams) converted many, many businesses to all-Mac houses when we demoed such wonders as booting and resuscitating a dead Mac from an iPod with a fully functional clone of (if stripped down) Mac OS; and then blew them away with automating the snot out of labor-intensive tasks and workflows.
Later I shifted to building both Point of Sale and medical practice software for Mac, ramping up to meet the as-yet unratified HIPAA requirements, and diverted into medical billing software; then pushed all that on to the original iPhone, and of course later the iPad, as quickly as possible.
Tons and tons of notable and fun stuff in between but little I’ve written is of interest thus far, anyway. To the none of you reading this far, I thank you for letting this addled old mind write this down before my faltering memory fails altogether.
The journey as a whole isn’t much fun for me after 2012, but I will bleed Apple and Mac forever, even if Apple doesn’t.