Happy birthday, Macintosh!

Today is the 22nd birthday of the Apple Macintosh computer!

Vow! I could never dream of how much the Apple Mac has changed my life! It changed entirely the way how I worked as a designer (actually it changed almost the entire graphic design and graphic reproduction industries!), especially what I had been trained in the design school was mostly by hand in those days. It empowered me to do a lot of things which would never be possibly done by hand or with the skill I learned. It brought me a lot of fun and satisfaction, which made me sharing the Mac to people as if I was sharing a 2nd gospel (see note below). It gave me a lot of pride. It shifted the direction of my career. It made me stayed awake for countless nights and overnights to learn using all sorts of software and solve those technical problems. It consumed me a lot of money running after for the hardware and software upgrades (but also earned me some money too). It also brought me a lot of jealousy and complains from my wife for being a Mac maniac!

My first Mac dated back to 1989, when I bought my first computer in my life for HK$22K! It was a Mac SE with a stone-age configuration which is seen as a joke today -- not to mention about the minimal memory and hard disk storage space it had, just imagine what you can do with a 9-inch black & white monitor (yes, not even grayscale!)... Yet it was enough to make my ex-design classmates amazed about it. The fun of Macintoshing even led me writing articles, reviews, columns in magazines and even a book about it!

Well, it's been 16+ years now, I can say the Mac still empowers me and brings me a lot of fun in computing. I can never imagine working without it. What and how would life be if the Mac didn't come out?

Note: There're 3 things that I couldn't stop myself from sharing with people. I called them the 3 gospels of mine: the Mac, the Palm, and Jesus Christ.