I am finally catching up a bit here … traveling for a week — with most of it spent without dedicated access or time to act on items has pushed my ability to engage in anything but work and family to edges of my capabilities. Finally a weekend; an end to a week that beat me up hard — I am still recovering from the worst jet lag I have ever dealt with, dealing with a cold, pulling my schedule out of hell at work, and fighting my way through the start of a heavy duty allergy season. Sorry to bitch … I don’t mean to.

I just came across a great read over at Ars Technica titled, “Five years of Mac OS X.” Most of the four people who read this blog know I am a Mac nut from way back — to the beginning actually. If I had a scanner I’d post a flat out hilarious picture of myself sitting in my old room on East Street in Bloomsburg with my feet up on my desk wearing a cheesy thin “Huey Lewis and the News” style tie, and an even cheesier pre-teen mustache at my trusty Mac 128K that I had gotten for my 12th birthday … Fast forward and here I sit, feet up at my desk with a MacBook Pro on the verge of my 34th Birthday 22 years later still loving every second of it. When I got that Mac, my Dad told me it was a fad and I know he felt is was a waste of money at the time. Well, no judgments here, but I do have a good job that centers around the use of technology — and let me tell you that when I was growing up, the thought that I might actually amount to anything more than a trash guy was starting to look like a long shot.

At any rate, looking back at the article made me realize that I’ve been through one amazing journey being a part of the space I live and work in. When I first put my hands on technology up at Old Science Hall at Bloomsburg State College (now Bloomsburg University) I was in one of the rat labs in the Psych Department. I’d go up and bug my Dad while he was working and would roam around and use the computers — these were pre-Macintosh days, but just seeing those things do stuff amazed me. One of my Dad’s friends, Alex ran the lab and would let me use the machines … he showed me how to write a couple of lines of code … you know the whole goto 10 and print your name over and over again on the screen kind of stuff. I was hooked. I had no idea, even into High School, that there were fields like Computer Science but I was hooked.

As I sit here thinking about the technological milestones that have occurred in my life I can’t help but be amazed. The enabling concepts associated with the information society — always on access, amazing advances in health care, unparalleled access to information, and on and on — make me feel like we are part of a time that will be difficult to recreate. At any rate, Happy Birthday Mac OSX and a week and half, Apple … and I’ll say it, Happy Birthday to me! Oh, and thanks Mom and Dad for wasting all that money on a silly “toy” computer that created my career all the way back in 1984 … I sort of get that commercial now, “you’ll see why 1984, won’t be like 1984.”

How did it start for you?