My first exposure of computers of any sorts was i286 and 386 with a CGA monitor. Obviously the most commonly used applications were Turbo C and turbo Pascal and we used get hard ons writing TSRs and figuring out BIOS codes and using Norton’s Chronicles. The world was hovering around DOS and beautiful DOS.
Around that time , my cousin Vishwas introduced me to the world beyond DOS. We went to design studio in Pune and gawked at Amiga 2000 and the beautiful animations made on that machine. He also got a Macintosh II CX .
We loved the UI , we loved the colors and we loved the cool apps which came with it such as Adobe Pagemaker and the cool Trash can. We learned new tricks and played with it like a toy in kids’ hand.
We were the only year in final year engineering who had a neatly typed report on the final year project on MAC with PageMaker. It was the start of My experience with Apple.
Many Macs came and went by that time and we were thrilled to see innovation emerging from Apple stable. The coolest design I loved was Imac g3 which was as attractive as a racing car. Most of my work experience was evolved on Windows 3.11 , Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95 till 1992 but the comparison with MAC OS was always in back of your mind.
Getting inside Apple was the dream of the company where I worked and finally in 1996 , Apple Macs for the first time had Intel CPUs inside.
Though I never owned a MAC , I started looking at the other cools stuff from Apple stable . My first IPOD – a 30GB white chubby was a discovery and I started getting hooked to Itunes and was figuring out how to rip my mp3s on the ipod.
As the famous sayings goes , disk space and bandwidth does not satisfy your cravings to get more . my iPod went from 30GB to 60GB and beyond. A few more Shuffles and A violet Nano which became an inseparable companion on the trademill, the quest to have an Apple every day was on.
I moved to IPhone 2G with unlocking skill s taught by my cousins. Ziphone and Zimbra were my first tutors and then I moved to Ultras0w , greenpoison and others. Jail breaking was a rage and I explored every corner of my Iphone 2G till it was lost. It was so funny to show off the Iphone in Microsoft offices. A few Microsoft employees got their IPhones only to scolded by Steve Ballmer later.
A new toy came by which was IPAD and my freedom to explore the Apple gadgets was snatched away by my 8 year and 6 year olds. They became the new masters of the Apple house and slowly became the primary users of the IPAD.
What I loved was the ecosystem around the Apple toys with Apps , sleeves , skins , adapters , jackets and docks. I am sure every Apple sold there were at least 100 $ worth junk was bought.
Last year , I watched the documentary “ Pirates of the Silicon Valley “ and had fun understanding the complex relationships between Steve and Bill.
So what’s the big deal ? Why I loved apple ? Three things – Great user experience , Great reliability and continuous innovation to form the i-cult. I took inspiration from the clean and neat UI to start thinking on my India UI app – Darpan and without shame ready to admit it draw inspirations from IPad.
So Thank you Steve for making this experience memorable so far. I am sure the Apple team will continue on the legacy and churn out more innovations in time to come.
