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The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.

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.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

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.

I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.

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.

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.

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.

My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.