Fifteen years later Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. The company I worked for (HBO) and Philip Morris, the cigarette company, were the only two companies in the city that I knew of that used primarily Macintoshes (except for the legal department, which used all PCs and every document was redlined, outlined, greenlit, in WordPerfect 7.1.1).

Gil Amelio, the CEO of the company for about 3 seconds came to visit HBO. We were all so impressed with him. The CEO of Apple! How much cooler could you get? At the time they were about this close from bankruptcy or being, at the very least, hopelessly inconsequential.

Five years before that was the Apple Newton. The head of Carnegie Mellon’s Art school said to me, “this will change the world.” And five years before that, I wrote my first term paper on this amazing little device, the Mac 512k. I also saw Steve Jobs when he visited Cornell’s Computer Science Department to get them to buy some NEXT machines. They were beautiful. Maybe still the most beautiful desktop machines I’ve ever seen.

Black cubes, super powerful. They were magic to program and experiment with. I wrote a chess program on them. Everyone surrounded Steve Jobs just to see what he looked like. I was jealous. He was young, rich, and had so much charisma you couldn’t even see past the light that shined out of him.