Monday, January 21st, 2008
Six Years Ago Today
Six years ago yesterday, I was working at a company called OneBody in Emeryville, California and living in a freezing cold loft in Oakland. I had eradicated all Microsoft software from my life, including a Hotmail email address I'd had since the mid '90s, and was grudgingly running Linux on my home computer. I was in the market for a Mac because I was intrigued by the iPod, which had been released a few months before, and was way into the Free BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X, but I hadn't yet pulled the trigger.
Six years ago today, Apple introduced the "lampshade" iMac and though I don't think I ordered one the day they were announced, I did soon after. As I waited for it to come, I read some huge OS X for Unix geeks book and began following some Mac oriented blogs. When it finally arrived at my office, my coworkers stood around as I unboxed and set it up, then we all took turns checking it out. That night, I started work on mac.evanrose.com, a PHP/MySQL driven Mac blog that I hosted on the iMac from home and whose content management system eventually became the backend for this site.
Six years and many, many Macs later, I've worked for Apple, worked for various Apple consultants, done my own consulting in Texas and New York, worked for Tekserve, inspired hundreds of switchers and helped hundreds more (including running software updates on my mom's Cube over Christmas), watched (and read liveblogs of) a whole bunch of keynotes, read a whole mess of Mac blogs, watched a lot of movies through Front Row, got an iPhone, still use my four year old iPod, and made a ton of money on my Apple stock. It keeps getting easier and more exciting to be a Mac user and I'm looking forward to another six great years.