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I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.

I left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac.

Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs?

Before the Internet, all most people cared about was Office. And Office was really the only reason anyone wanted Windows machines instead of Macs.

Apple took the edge off the word 'computer.'

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.

It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.