I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.
I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken.
My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.
The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.
With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.
Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.
It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.
As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
I left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac.
I was fortunate that I came out to the Valley in 1979, when I came out to go to Stanford Business School, and my very first assignment as a teaching assistant for an investments professor was to - he told me go down to this computer company in Cupertino called Apple.