My first Mac

I bought my first Apple Mac on July 4, 1984, at a store on Harbor Boulevard in Huntington Beach, long before there were dedicated Apple stores. It was kind of a spontaneous decision, not one that I had thoroughly thought through. Several of the stockbrokers I met had inquired, would I offer a Mac version?

I started to port the Plaid Brothers code to it. I had originally written it on a DEC Rainbow, a pre-IBM personal computer. The Rainbow ran both CPM and MS-DOS, so I could easily transfer the code to CPM then import it to the Mac. The hard part was figuring out the easy stuff, like using the mouse for copy and paste. I was a wiz at dBase II, the database management system at the heart of the code. Wrote a bunch of low level operating system scripts, too.

So how did it go? Sell many systems for the Mac? Not even half a dozen. The IBM PC ruled the world. We could often sell a gray-market PC bundled with our software in the very early days, for the extra margin. We advanced to building small peer to peer networks, our larger clients need these configurations; we sold a few, but they worked poorly – better networking required dedicated servers that our eventual enterprise clients could afford, but not the onesie, twosies we cut our teeth on.

How did we learn about these capabilities, these networking systems? Every year Eric and I would drive to Comdex in Las Vegas. It was a huge computer trade show and we could talk to the reps and see the latest gear in action.

These trips to Vegas, I went 11 years, coincided with what we thought of as the start of Plaid. The first trip there started from the company in Costa Mesa I had been working for as head of major accounts. They were slowly but surely going bankrupt; inventory challenges were like a cancer, so they started laying people off. I made it past the early rounds and my boss told me he’d give me the heads up when I’d get the boot. I used that advance notice to apply my employee discount. Eric was waiting in the parking lot when I walked out with a Compaq sewing-machine-sized portable PC, with 2 floppy drives. I tossed it in the trunk and we were off to Las Vegas.