I Have To Come Clean About My 25 Year Realationship....

I can't believe I am finally going to admit that for the last 25 years I have had an unnatural relationship! I know some have suspected and I have tried to hide it, keep this part of my life a secret. Others have tried to convince me that there was was a more normal way. I have tried and tried but hard as I try I just don't feel comfortable and I have resisted. So here it is, I am ready to profess my love openly after 25 years of keeping my feelings to myself and I can say with a great deal of pride that I have had and continue to have a deep and lasting relationship with... my Macintosh!
The Mac turned 25 on the 24th and here are some pics of my Macs over the past quarter century. It was 1984 when I first saw the now infamous Mac commercial during the Superbowl that year. I like many were enamored by the idea of a home computer that could actually do something, though at the time know one knew what that was. In a interview with Playboy in 1985 Steve Jobs eluded to the future this way:

PLAYBOY: What will change?
JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

PLAYBOY: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?
JOBS: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

PLAYBOY: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
JOBS: In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. . . Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. (To read more of the Jobs Interview click here)

My own experience started when I started working in the Illustration and design world after college and one of my first work computers was a mono-chromatic Mac SE with only 512k of RAM! I remember my first ever experience on a Mac in Photoshop! I was hooked for life. I moved to a Quadra, then a Performa, a G3 tower, the first intel core duo iMac and now finally a sexy 24inch aluminum core 2 duo.... with 4 gigs of RAM and a full TB hard drive!(I mean what more could a guy want!) OK allot more but ummm.....;-)
Today my relationship is far deeper than even I would care to admit. To some that seems unnatural but to me its the fulfillment of Apples promise by creating machines that become an extension of the users in a very organic way. With this Mac I can be as creative as I dare dream to be... in multiple disciplines with out ever taking a class in anything... music, drawing and painting, photography, writing.... all things I have done because of the intuitive nature of the Mac software. So Happy 25th Anniversary Mac! I cant wait to see you 25 more years.

Here are some more quotes from Steve:

Jobs on what it takes to create an “insanely great product”:

How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Jobs on his then-relationship with Steve Wozniak:

When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

Jobs on why the computer industry is dominated by young people:

People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them… It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.

Jobs on his future at Apple:

I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.

I leave you with the commercial that started it all:


Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.