Tag: iMac

The Mac 30 years on

Posted on by Ray in Executive leadership, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, Visionary leadershp

I have to admit it. I have been a Mac and Apple bigot since 1984. I saw the commercial for the Mac and just had to have one. I saw the Lisa, a Mac precursor at a conference in town and was very impressed.

At the time, we were using these green or orange screens at work connected to IBM mainframes running TSO or VM/CMS and we thought we were leading edge.

And then the Mac comes out with proportional fonts, graphics terminal screen, dot matrix printing that could print anything you could possibly draw, a mouse and a 3.5″ floppy.

Somehow my wife became convinced and bought our family’s first Mac for her accounting office. You could buy spreadsheet and a WYSIWIG Word processor software and run them all in 128KB. She ended up buying Mac accounting software and that’s what she used to run her office.

She upgraded over the years and got the 512K Mac but eventually when  she partnered with two other accountants she changed to a windows machines. And that’s when the Mac came home.

I used the Mac, spreadsheets and word processing for most of my home stuff and did some programming on it for odd jobs but mostly it just was used for home office stuff. We upgraded this over the years, eventually getting a PowerMac which had a base station with a separate CRT above it, but somehow this never felt like a Mac.

Then in 2002 we got the 15″ new iMac. This came as a half basketball base with a metal arm emerging out of the top of it, with a color LCD screen attached. I loved this Mac. We still have it but nobody’s using it anymore. I used it to edit my first family films using an early version of iMovie. It took hours to upload the video and hours more to edit it. But in the end, you had a movie on the iMac or on CD which you could watch with your family. You can’t imagine how empowered I felt.

Sometime later I left corporate America for the life of a industry analyst/consultant. I still used the 15″ iMac for the first year after I was out but ended up purchasing an alluminum Powerbook Mac laptop with my first check. This was faster than the 15″ iMac and had about the same size screen. At the time, I thought I would spend a lot out of time on the road.

But as it turns out, I didn’t spend that much time out of the office so when I generated enough revenue to start feeling more successful, I bought a iMac G5. The kids were using this until last year when I broke it. This had a bigger screen and was definitely a step up in power, storage and had a  Superdrive which allowed me to burn DVD-Rs for our family movies. When I wasn’t working I was editing family movies in half an hour or less (after import) and converting them to DVDs. Somewhere during this time, Garageband came out and I tried to record and edit a podcast, this took hours to complete and to export as a podcast.

I moved from the PowerBook laptop to a MacBook laptop. I don’t spend a lot of time out of the office but when I do I need a laptop to work on. A couple of years back I bought a MacBook Air and have been in love with it ever since. I just love the way it feels, light to the touch and doesn’t take up a lot of space. I bought a special laptop backpack for the old MacBook but it’s way overkill for the Air. Yes, it’s not that powerful, has less storage and  has the smaller screen (11″) but in a way it’s more than enough to live with on long vacations or out of the office

Sometime along the way I updated to my desktop to the aluminum iMac. It had a bigger screen, more storage and was much faster. Now movie editing was a snap. I used this workhorse for four years before finally getting my latest generation iMac with the biggest screen available and faster than I could ever need (he says now). Today, I edit GarageBand podcasts in a little over 30 minutes and it’s not that hard to do anymore.

Although, these days Windows has as much graphic ability as the Mac, what really made a difference for me and my family is the ease of use, multimedia support and the iLife software (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iWeb, & GarageBand) over the years and yes, even iTunes. Apple’s Mac OS software has evolved over the years but still seems to be the easiest desktop to use, bar none.

Let’s hope the Mac keeps going for another 30 years.

Photo Credits:  Original 128k Mac Manual by ColeCamp, 

my original Macintosh by Blake Patterson, 

Brand new iMac, February 16, 2002 by Dennis Brekke

MacBook Air by nuzine.eu

iMac Late 2012 by Cellura Technology

Our long romance with Apple technology

Posted on by Ray in System effectiveness, System quality, Visionary leadershp

 

Lisa 2/5 by MattsMacintosh (cc) (from Flickr)
Lisa 2/5 by MattsMacintosh (cc) (from Flickr)

We all heard last night of the passing of Steve Jobs.  But rather than going over his life I would like to here discuss some of the Apple products I have used over my life and how they affected our family.

 

I don’t know why but I never got an Apple II. In fact the first time I saw one in use was in the early 80’s. But it certainly looked nifty.

But I was struck with love at first sight when I saw the Lisa, a progenitor of the Mac.  I was at a computer conference in the area which had a number of products on display but when I saw the Lisa I couldn’t see anything else.  It had a 3.5″ floppy drive which was encased in hard plastic, hardly ever considered a floppy anymore.  But the real striking aspect was its screen, a white background, bit mapped screen that sported great black and white graphics.

At the time, I was using IBM 3270 terminals which had green lettering on a dark screen and the only graphics were ones made with rows and columns of asterisks.  To see the graphics pop to life on the Lisa, different font options, what you see is what you get was just extraordinary at the time.  The only downside was its $10K price.  Sadly we didn’t buy one of these either.

Mac worship

Then the 1984 commercial came out in the superbowl spot.  The one where Apple was going to free the computing world from the oppression of big brother with the introduction of the first Macintosh computer.

We got our hands on one soon after and my wife used it for her small accounting business and just loved it.   Over time as she took on partners their office migrated to business applications that were more suited for PCs but she stayed on the Mac long after it was sub-optimal, just because it was easy to use.

 

Apple Fat Mac by Accretion Disc (cc) (From Flickr)
Apple Fat Mac by Accretion Disc (cc) (From Flickr)

Ultimately, she moved to a PC  taking her Fat Mac home to be used there instead.  Over the next decade or so we updated the Mac to a color screen and a desktop configuration but didn’t really do much with it other than home stuff.

 

Then the iMac’s came out. We latched onto the half basketball one which had a screen protruding out of it.  We used this for some video and photo editing and just loved it.  Video upload and editing took forever but there was nothing else out there that could even come close.

 

Our 1st iMac
Our 1st iMac

I ended up using this machine the first few years after I left corporate America but also bought a Mac lap top, encased in aluminum for my business trips.    Both these ran PowerPC microprocessor but eventually ran an early generation of Mac OSX.

 

A couple of years later we moved on to the all-in-one, Intel based, desktop iMac’s and over time updated to bigger screens, faster processing and more storage.  We are still on iMac desktops for home and office use today.

iPhone infatuation

In 2008 we moved from a dumb cell phone to a smart iPhone 3G.  We wanted to wait until the world phone came out which supported GSM.

But this was another paradigm shift for me. When working in the corporate world I had a blackberry and could use it for contacts, email, and calendar but seldom did anything else on it.  And in fact, at the time I used a PalmPilot for a number of business applications, games, and other computing needs.

When the iPhone3G came out, both the PalmPilot and dumb cell phone were retired and we went completely Apple for all our cell phone needs.  Today, I probably scan email, tweet, and do a number of other applications on my iPhone almost as often as I do them on the iMac.  Over time we moved one or the other of us to the 3Gs and 4 and now the children are starting to get hand me down iPhones and love them just as well.

iPad devotion

Then in May of 2010, we bought an iPad.  This was a corporate purchase but everyone used it.  I tried to use it to replace my laptop a number of times (see my posts To iPad or Not to iPad parts 1, 2, 3 & 4) and ultimately concluded it wouldn’t work for me.  We then went out and got a Mac Airbook and now the iPad is mainly used to check email do some light editing as well as gaiming, media and other light computing activities.

The fact is, sitting on our living room couch, checking email, twitter and taking noteshas made using all these tools that much easier. When we saw the iPad2 we liked what we saw but it took so long for it to become available in the stores that we had lost all gadget lust and are now waiting to see what the next generation looks like when it comes out.

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All in all almost 30 years with Apple products both in the home and at work have made me a lifelong advocate.

I never worked for Apple but have heard that most of these products were driven single-mindly by Steve Jobs.  If that was the case, I would have to say that Steve Jobs was a singular technical visionary, that understood what was then possible and took the steps needed to make it happen.  In doing that, he changed computing forever and for that I salute him.

Steve Jobs RIP