Earlier this year, Christophe Laporte of the French-language publication MacGeneration asked if I might share a personal memory about Apple for a project they were working on for Apple's 50th anniversary.
As we approach that anniversary this week, I thought I'd share that memory here as well!
https://fr.ulule.com/50-ans-apple-le-livre-par-macgeneration/
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Every time I see the original bright six-color Apple logo, I'm reminded of the Apple ][ donated to our small school just before the end of the school year. I asked the librarian if I could borrow its stack of spiral-bound manuals over the summer. I pored through that stack of manuals as my family road-tripped from Seattle to South Dakota—my mind fully occupied by the information contained within, as my senses took in the feel of the paper and the smell of the books.
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Even without the computer, I thought about what I could make that computer do when I got back, scribbling out BASIC programs in the back seat with pencil on paper.
I was entranced by the empowering possibilities of that early "bicycle for the mind"—a feeling that has never left me.
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When Macintosh was introduced as "the computer for the rest of us"—sporting its bright six-color Apple logo—what really caught my attention was the huge stack of Xeroxed "Inside Macintosh" developer manuals: kept in a three-ringed binder at the University's computer center, filled with loads of Pascal APIs. And when Steve introduced the NeXT cube with its stack of API manuals, I was entranced. My life has revolved around the platform ever since.
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Ken Case
John Cortexiphan
