The first com­puter I ever touched

The first time I ever touched a com­puter was as a third-​​grader in the small Catholic grade school I had attended. I remem­ber being intim­i­dated by the big machine in front of me with a key­board that didn’t seem to have the let­ters “in the right order.” Or at least that’s what my 8-​​year old mind thought.

But what I do remem­ber is the black screen with the green let­ter­ing. And the game that our com­puter teacher-​​slash-​​gym teacher would have us play.

“Open apple” to catch the falling apple in the bas­ket, he’d tell us. “Closed apple” to close the bas­ket from ani­mals try­ing steal the apple.

It was a large bulky piece of equip­ment, that Apple III com­puter; but it was the first com­puter I ever touched.

And as I sit here typ­ing away on my Mac­Book Pro, I can’t help but reflect on how much Apple has been a part of my life.

Open Apple, Closed Apple

Okay, so maybe for a spell of time — let’s say  back in the mid ’80’s — we owned a Texas Instru­ment com­puter. And maybe those high school days were spent work­ing on an IBM com­puter. (I’m sure Steve Jobs would have for­given us; see­ing that he had left Apple dur­ing that period of time.)

But you see, I count those days in our grade school’s “com­puter lab” as the moment I became a “loyal” Apple fan. So loyal that, even though my university’s com­puter lab had rows and rows of PC’s … I would patiently wait for one of the 5 or so Apples to open up to type up my term papers. Or I’d wait to use one so that I could fig­ure out how to work this “new tech­nol­ogy” called “elec­tronic mail” … a way that I could save money from my phone bill so I could com­mu­ni­cate with future-​​Hubby at his university’s com­puter lab that had rows and rows of Apple Computers.

Mac­in­tosh SE 30

(Yes kids … what’s com­mon, every­day tech­nol­ogy for you today was brand-​​spanking new for us back in the early ’90’s!)

Even after grad­u­at­ing from uni­ver­sity … the first home com­puter I owned was a “hand-​​me-​​down” Mac­in­tosh SE 30, loaned to me by future-​​Hubby when I moved into my first apartment.

Hubby, too was a big Apple fan. Of course, his started at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan and con­tin­ued after­wards as one of his first jobs after col­lege was work­ing for the now defunct Com­puter City store. And because of the nature of his career, Apple Com­put­ers were the most preva­lent work-​​horse when it came to Graphic Design. So once he bought his first Mac, we never looked back.

Apple web­site home page for Oct 5, 2011

Today, our house­hold is filled with Apple prod­ucts:  from the first Mac SE 30 (that stills sits on our kitchen pass-​​through) to the shini­est biggest iMac that Hubby uses for work on a daily basis. Not to men­tion the “com­puter grave­yard” we have in our base­ment (or in our home office) that con­tains bits and parts of Apple stuff. (There’s even two old 2^nd gen­er­a­tion iPods with the clas­sic “click wheel” lying around some­where … Don’t judge — one of them was a gift from a dear friend that didn’t know we already had one!)

And then there’s our iPhones (old 3G ones) and iPads … things we now feel like we can’t live without.

By now you’ve gath­ered that Apple has been a big part of our lives, espe­cially over the past 20 years. And I’m pos­i­tively sure that we’re not the only ones that have been loyal to the com­pany. So yes, read­ing about Steve Jobs pass­ing had really affected us … and, by see­ing all the FB posts and tweets, his death has obvi­ously affected the rest of the world.

Hubby’s trib­ute to Steve Jobs

I’ve said it before … maybe not any­where here on my blog … but I’ve always said that Steve Jobs is the Walt Dis­ney of my gen­er­a­tion; the great­est inno­va­tor of the lat­ter 20^th/​early 21^st cen­tury. While he had already cemented his place in his­tory by being one of the co-​​founders of Apple Com­put­ers (along with Steve Woz­niak) in 1976, he will always be remem­bered as the man who suc­cess­fully merged high-​​end tech­nol­ogy with every day life.

As I said above, I can no longer live with­out my iPhone or Mac­Book Pro … but I’ll have to learn to live with­out Steve Jobs.

And because this is still my favorite commercial …