I was never all that interested in PC clones. I had my BBC Micro, and later, Archimedes - gorgeously designed both, ironically designing their own death and rebirth with the ARM. Which led to Trilobyte, and from there, a motley assortment of projects.
The Archimedes finally gave up the ghost while at tbyte.com, but was supplanted by Raccoon, my first laptop, a company PowerBook 5300c - Apple's first PPC laptop, having completed their migration from the venerable Motorola line of processors. (Not their greatest design, I'd have to admit, with the PPC603e being backed up by no L2 cache - when the Wallstreet family came out a couple years later, the shift from 100MHz to 266MHz was amplified a few times just by the presence of 1MB sitting on a backside bus) Still, it was a joy to use. ^_^ There I and Echeo could be, by Starbucks (the local culture =:), noodling around in Photoshop.
I was, at that time, quite tempted by a laptop of my own, and looked around Windowsland, shortlisting a few, but didn't wind up going ahead with that. When Trilobyte came to an end, I was offered the chance to buy Raccoon at a very favorable price, and so it eventually came back to me.
At the same time, as you may recall, I was hosting FurToonia and Brazilian Dreams II, on a NextStation Turbo. One of Graeme's wonderful ideas was that everyone in the company had at least one NeXT system on their desk - so email, faxing, and printing were delightfully easy. The host system I used for development there was a Quadra, and I took to Mac OS easily enough, but there was something quite special about NextStep/OpenStep.
By late 1996, when Trilobyte started imploding, Apple wasn't exactly in the greatest shape - not as critical as some pundits like to paint, but far from the powerhouse it had once been, not to belittle the various ingenious projects that were going on. It was, of course, becoming obvious that a new OS was becoming necessary - not a refinement, but a new start.
The idea of Be being bought was intriguing, yet suddenly NeXT emerged as the favorite - and thus was the most famous reverse takeover we've seen. =:D Some dismissed it, of course, as "too little, too late". Ah, if I'd only had money to put into Apple back then.. !
So, I bought my Wallstreet, and reveled in its ST:TNG stylings, and actual GPU, for actual games. ^_^ (And soon after, Connectix's amazing PlayStation emulator, subsequently bought by Sony to a fanfare of fluffy PR about how this would permit so much more to happen, before being dropped down the deepest hole they could dig)
The iMac, of course, marked the real start of what we now think of as Apple - back to the original concept, keeping it simple. Then the iBook. Then.. the iPod. I admit, I couldn't quite see the point, but plenty of people did.. ^_^;
Then the iPhone kickstarted smartphones into high gear, after a snoozy few years of RIM and sundry Symbian devices, and the iPad, yet another target for disdain and derision, only to bring forth a slew of copycats.
Not forgetting the Apple Stores, of course. We'd all seen just how wonderful Best Buy, and even Sears, were when it came to having functional demo models and helpful staff. Yet, in the midst of a bad economic time, with many tech companies slashing their spending as quickly as possible, there was Apple, hiring, both for the stores, and in Cupertino.
It's that kind of thinking I've always admired, and which Steve Jobs was able to follow through on - he knew what would work, and went ahead and did it. Sometimes, as with the iPad and iPhone, it'd form the basis of a secret multi-year development track, leaving competitors scrambling upon release. Always, with style.
I'm sure there'll be another Jobs sometime or other, and Apple's got loads of superb talent - but the industry won't be the same without the person responsible for bringing GUIs to the masses, creating the tablet market, and much more. He really lived.
The Archimedes finally gave up the ghost while at tbyte.com, but was supplanted by Raccoon, my first laptop, a company PowerBook 5300c - Apple's first PPC laptop, having completed their migration from the venerable Motorola line of processors. (Not their greatest design, I'd have to admit, with the PPC603e being backed up by no L2 cache - when the Wallstreet family came out a couple years later, the shift from 100MHz to 266MHz was amplified a few times just by the presence of 1MB sitting on a backside bus) Still, it was a joy to use. ^_^ There I and Echeo could be, by Starbucks (the local culture =:), noodling around in Photoshop.
I was, at that time, quite tempted by a laptop of my own, and looked around Windowsland, shortlisting a few, but didn't wind up going ahead with that. When Trilobyte came to an end, I was offered the chance to buy Raccoon at a very favorable price, and so it eventually came back to me.
At the same time, as you may recall, I was hosting FurToonia and Brazilian Dreams II, on a NextStation Turbo. One of Graeme's wonderful ideas was that everyone in the company had at least one NeXT system on their desk - so email, faxing, and printing were delightfully easy. The host system I used for development there was a Quadra, and I took to Mac OS easily enough, but there was something quite special about NextStep/OpenStep.
By late 1996, when Trilobyte started imploding, Apple wasn't exactly in the greatest shape - not as critical as some pundits like to paint, but far from the powerhouse it had once been, not to belittle the various ingenious projects that were going on. It was, of course, becoming obvious that a new OS was becoming necessary - not a refinement, but a new start.
The idea of Be being bought was intriguing, yet suddenly NeXT emerged as the favorite - and thus was the most famous reverse takeover we've seen. =:D Some dismissed it, of course, as "too little, too late". Ah, if I'd only had money to put into Apple back then.. !
So, I bought my Wallstreet, and reveled in its ST:TNG stylings, and actual GPU, for actual games. ^_^ (And soon after, Connectix's amazing PlayStation emulator, subsequently bought by Sony to a fanfare of fluffy PR about how this would permit so much more to happen, before being dropped down the deepest hole they could dig)
The iMac, of course, marked the real start of what we now think of as Apple - back to the original concept, keeping it simple. Then the iBook. Then.. the iPod. I admit, I couldn't quite see the point, but plenty of people did.. ^_^;
Then the iPhone kickstarted smartphones into high gear, after a snoozy few years of RIM and sundry Symbian devices, and the iPad, yet another target for disdain and derision, only to bring forth a slew of copycats.
Not forgetting the Apple Stores, of course. We'd all seen just how wonderful Best Buy, and even Sears, were when it came to having functional demo models and helpful staff. Yet, in the midst of a bad economic time, with many tech companies slashing their spending as quickly as possible, there was Apple, hiring, both for the stores, and in Cupertino.
It's that kind of thinking I've always admired, and which Steve Jobs was able to follow through on - he knew what would work, and went ahead and did it. Sometimes, as with the iPad and iPhone, it'd form the basis of a secret multi-year development track, leaving competitors scrambling upon release. Always, with style.
I'm sure there'll be another Jobs sometime or other, and Apple's got loads of superb talent - but the industry won't be the same without the person responsible for bringing GUIs to the masses, creating the tablet market, and much more. He really lived.
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