I lied about never using a Mac: from Mouse Practice to Mac admin
I recently told the MacAdmins podcast that when I applied to work at the Apple Store in 2008, I didn’t know anything about computers and I had never used a Mac before.
That’s not entirely true. I’ve actually been using Macs for most of my life.
Apple IIgs and The Oregon Trail
My earliest memory of using a computer was in elementary school. Once a week, my class would walk down the hall from our usual classroom to the computer lab, a room lined wall to wall with Apple IIgs computers. They would put covers over the keyboards to hide them from our gaze, and we’d insert the 5.25 inch floppy disk for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. If we finished our typing lesson for the day with class time to spare, we could trade in our Mavis Beacon floppy disk for The Oregon Trail. I didn’t know what dysentary was, but I sure did die from it a lot trying to make my way to Oregon.
The Performa and pretending to save the world
It was either Christmas of 1993 or my birthday in 1994 when my grandparents gifted me a Macintosh Performa 476. Jurassic Park had come out in the summer of 1993, and like any kid around Tim and Lex’s age I was obsessed. I was especially enamored with the idea of being able to control things like door locks from a computer.
I remember sitting at my computer, pretending I was Lex, saying “It’s a Unix system, I know this!” and saving the day by rebooting all of the systems just before the raptors could force their way through my bedroom door. I didn’t even know what a Unix system was, I just thought it sounded cool.
If you could’ve told me then that someday I’d be able to turn on my lights, lock the door to my house, and even open my garage door - not just from a computer, but from a phone in my pocket - I wouldn’t have believed you. A phone! In my pocket!
Around this time, my special interest became marine biology. I attribute this partially to my grandparents taking me to Sea World for my birthday, and partly to another masterpiece of 1993 media: SeaQuest DSV. I promise I’m going to tie this back into computers, just bear with me.
You see, SeaQuest also had a kid, Lucas. A bit older than Tim and Lex in Jurassic Park, I thought he was so cool. He was a computer hacker (see? I told you) and had a dolphin named Darwin for a best friend. Lucas even built a computer system he could use to talk to Darwin. What’s not to love there? I remember fantasizing about having my own dolphin best friend someday, and building my own animal-human communication system.
There was a “game” on the Performa called Mouse Practice, which was really just there to teach you how to use the mouse. It featured a scuba diver looking for underwater treasure. Because of my love of all things ocean, and perhaps a lack of anything better to do, I “played” Mouse Practice over and over. To this day, I’m still pretty good at using a mouse.
The internet arrives
Not long after getting the Performa, the internet arrived. I remember the modem - a separate box that connected to the computer and our home phone line. Connecting to the internet, you would hear the modem screech in all of its 28.8k glory. I’m still not sure why we had to listen to the computer scream before we could conntect to the internet. Maybe that was a harbinger of what was to come. But that’s another blog post.
I remember finding bulletin board systems, and niche websites created by amateur enthusiasts on extremely specific topics. How, at this point, I didn’t end up getting into amateur radio, or building my own games, or some other extremely nerdy technical pursuit, is beyond me. Had I stumbled into the right corner of the internet, I probably would have. I saw the potential there, but I didn’t know how to access it. It just seemed like something that was beyond my reach, and all school was teaching me was how to type and play Oregon Trail.
It was also around this time that I disovered Myst through a family friend. I remember being equally frustrated and mesmerizing by it. I’d spend hours exploring the island, clicking on everything, wandering through empty rooms and across beautifully rendered landscapes, having absolutely no idea what the hell I was actually supposed to be doing. I never did solve it, at least not until almost 20 years later. But I didn’t really care. Just being in that world, exploring it at my own pace, felt like enough.
A few years later, I got an electric guitar for Christmas and my special interest began shifting towards music. I had lost my sense of wonder around the computer, and it just turned into something I could use to look up poorly formatted and often wildly incorrect tablature for songs I was interested in playing.
The Bondi Blue iMac and discovering music sharing
In 1998, my grandparents gifted us a new computer: the Bondi Blue iMac. It had a built-in 56k modem and came with an AOL subscription. Keywords! Chat rooms! Message boards! And now I could even download these new things called MP3s and listen to music right there on the computer! It was incredible!
I figured out that I could hook the output of my Tascam 4-track recorder up to the computer’s microphone in port, and I could play back what I had recorded on my 4-track while recording into my computer, and then upload and share the music I had made. This felt revolutionary to me.
It was around this time that I discovered a home recording enthusiast forum. Most of the guys on there were using custom built PCs running Windows, with fancy audio to digital converters and full featured DAWs. I was just some kid with a 4-track and an iMac.
The PC years
I still remember what turned me away from Macs. I wanted to take the music I was making to school and show my friends. The guys on the home recording forum recommended burning a CD. But my iMac couldn’t do that. Its optical drive was read only. But these guys with Windows computers on the home recording forum could all burn CDs. That convinced me that PCs were superior to Macs, at least for what I wanted to do. So that Christmas, I asked for a PC.
I got a Dell. I don’t remember the model. It was an ugly tower that came with Windows XP. But most importantly, it had a CD burner. I got a fancy audio interface and a proper DAW. At this point, the computer was no longer a thing of wonder. It was a tool. A means to an end. It did its job, and that was that.
And that’s how things stayed for many years. By high school, our once-a-week computer class had evolved. We’d moved on from teaching us how to type to teaching us how to format documents in Microsoft Word. I remember how much emphasis they put on setting the margins correctly. Margins were apparently a critical skill that we had to get right, or else we’d never be able to get jobs.
I don’t think I’ve thought about margins since then.
In hindsight, I wish school had taught me anything else about computers. An intro to programming. An intro to graphic design. How to build a basic website. Anything! But they didn’t. So the computer stayed just a tool.
I got a laptop. And then a smaller laptop. All Windows PCs. I truly can’t remember anything remarkable about them. They were just tools.
The magic returns
My next Mac was the black MacBook running Mac OS X Leopard. I truly can’t remember if the Mac came before the job at Apple or the other way around, but I always say the job at Apple came first because it’s a better story.
I still remember the first time I turned it on. The welcome video - a video I would later learn to loathe after setting up what felt like my 1000th computer while working at Apple - was mesmerizing. It came with GarageBand, and suddenly I could record my musical ideas and program drums to go along with them instead of playing them poorly myself. That sense of possibility I’d felt as a kid sitting at the Performa was back.
But here’s the thing: I knew the basics of how to use a computer - I had plenty of practice with the mouse, after all - but I couldn’t tell you anything about how they actually worked, or what any of the specs meant. This was around the time Apple was switching to Intel processors, and I didn’t even know what a processor was. Working at Apple changed all of that for me.
After leaving Apple, I got a job at a digital marketing agency managing a small farm of Xserves running Snow Leopard Server, and a couple of Xserve RAIDs. Six months later, Apple discontinued the Xserve. Less than a year after that, I was laid off.
The rest of my career has been me trying to catch up to the computer education I never had but in hindsight so clearly was desperate for. Every job has been another lesson I should’ve learned in school. Managing those Xserves taught me about servers and networking. Other roles taught me scripting, system administration, how to actually understand what’s happening under the hood. I’ve learned more from online communities, documentation, and trial and error than I ever did in a classroom. It’s been like filling in a coloring book backward - learning the advanced stuff first and only later discovering the fundamentals that were supposed to come first.
But my love for the Apple platform has stuck with me. Since that day I turned on the black MacBook, my primary computer has always been some form of Mac laptop.