The Macintosh SE was my first personal computer. This would have been around 1987 and I was the Design and Production Manager at the University of South Carolina Press. At that time, almost no one had a computer at work so it took much convincing and hand-wringing to get approval through the SC requisition system. But finally I had it sitting on my desk and ready to put it to work. I planned to use it to design books and jackets. Back then, you literally had to trace letters or use press-on typographic sheets to do a mock up of a book cover--a very time consuming enterprise especially when you think about revisions which required doing the thing all over again.
With my little Mac and a MS word file of Nancy Roberts', South Carolina Ghosts I was able to quickly and easily design the text and lay it out. What would have taken me weeks of hard labor could now be painlessly done in a matter of hours. I fell in love with my Mac and by extension, Steve Jobs.
A year or so later, a PC with DOS was forced upon me and I was like, "You've got to be kidding me? Where's the icons? How does this thing work? I quickly returned to the security and perfect sanity of my Mac. This was before the days of the internet and long before anything called "social media" but in the tight-knit world of graphic designers, you wouldn't be caught dead with a PC. I fell deeper in love with my Mac.
Through the years, one Mac would replace another but they were all variations of that first little computer. I now can easily make my way in both the Mac and PC worlds. But I'll never forget my first love or the man behind the machine, Steve Jobs.
P.S. And thank you for my iphone.
