OneMind

April 1, 2006, marks the 30th anniversary of the official birth of Apple Computer. More than any other single company on the planet, Apple has shaped my life. And I am a grateful, though not always cheerful, recipient of much of the Spirit of Apple.

There aren’t many of us in the technology community who have been with Apple from the beginning. In part, that’s because a bunch of us went astray along the way and got sucked into the Redmond Vortex. In part, it’s a function of the fact that in order to be a 30-year Apple customer/veteran, you have to be of an age when most people have migrated to other interests and allowed technology to become more of a hobby than a passion. In fact, I was already old (31 years of age) by many standards when Apple burst on the scene. Yet even before the Macintosh made its debut nearly a decade after Apple’s birth, I was drawn to the company that was founded by and catered to those of more tender years. I’m not sure I can explain that. But I can report that over the three decades of my mostly positive relationship with Apple, I’ve never strayed to the Dark Side of Windows, though I have been forced to use other operating systems from time to time for blissfully brief periods.

The 30th anniversary of the company’s founding seems to provide a good excuse for a bit of a trip down Memory Lane. Join me if you like.

I got my first Apple computer from a store in Sunnyvale, California, called Computer Plus. This was in the very early days of computer retailing. The only other retail outlet in our area, called the Digital Deli, sold CP/M machines. Gerald Wright was the proprietor of the latter. I can’t recall the names of the young guys who ran Computer Plus but i became a real habitué of the place. I remember they had software in polyethylene bags hung on peg-board hooks, manually labeled.

The Apple ][ (yep, it was usually referred to not with two “I”s but with the square brackets, an early sign of Apple quirkiness) was my favorite computer from the time I got my hands on it. I had, prior to that, played around a bit with a MITS Altair 8800 machine that you programmed by manually entering op codes through a switch interface. Ugly but fun. (Later, of course, you could use the high-speed punched paper tape method of program and data entry. Whoopee!)

My first word processor was written in Pascal and was called something like Full Moon or Half Moon or something with a lunar reference anyway. It was so powerful but its interface was so opaque that it took a lot of time to type text into a file and get it formatted properly. But you could do it. And it was amazing.

I introduced several of my friends to the personal computer by dragging them forcibly to Computer Plus and making them buy an Apple system even though they were then going for a fairly steep price. (I recall one of my advertising buddies paying something close to $5k for a system that included a printer and a couple of external floppy drives before there were any hard drives for the machines.) For years afterward, he told anyone who would listen that I’d changed his life. I like to think that if I’d gotten him into a CP/M machine with WordStar, the emotion would probably not have been so high. I have dozens of similar stories.

Fast-forward to 1984 and the introduction of the Macintosh, a computer that literally changed my life. The first way it changed my life was in the way it opened my eyes to what was possible with a computer with a truly graphical UI. The second way it changed my life was that it became the subject of my first published computer book. Mitch Waite and Robert Lafore of The Waite Group contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write a book about programming the Macintosh. I said yes. A couple of weeks later, I drove to San Rafael to their offices, met with them, and got a 128K Macintosh, one of the first ones made available anywhere.

I can still remember opening the box, dragging out what I thought was the monitor (of course, the CPU was integrated into the case but I didn’t know that yet) and then hauling out this rodent-like creature called a “mouse.” I thought to myself, “What the heck do I need this thing for? I type over 200 wpm; a mouse is just going to get in the way.” Within a week, I had all but fused my right hand to the mouse and couldn’t believe how great an experience that interaction was.

Using Think Pascal (later Lightspeed) on one floppy and MacWrite on another floppy, I agonizingly wrote my first published computer book, “Pascal Programming for the Macintosh.” I literally had to reboot the machine at each step. I’d put in the Pascal floppy, bring the system up, write some code, get it working, write the code down by hand or print it out, shut down the machine, put in the MacWrite floppy, reboot, and write about that code, re-typing it in the process. And I thought that was efficient!

Fast-forward to 1987. I was working on a very interesting documentation project. One of Apple’s full-time writers showed me what was then called WildCard and asked me if I could help him figure out what it was because the engineering team was all over the map on it. I took home the set of floppies, checked it out, discovered there was a scripting language in there, and immediately went into a trance state from which some would argue I have never emerged.

I decided to do a book just about the scripting language. I couldn’t get a publisher interested so I took on the project with no advance and negotiated higher royalties. My wife and our stepson Tomas Hernandez worked like dogs day and night and we produced a camera-ready version of the book in six weeks so we could publish in time for MacWorld in January 1988. The book was a huge hit and put me on the map as far as being a computer book author and pundit was concerned.

My adventure and love affair with the Mac continues to the present day. I use a PowerBook G4 for all of my work, resorting to Windows only when I need to test software or view a Web site I’m creating. I’ve probably converted 20 or 30 people to Mac in the last year or two. I have a T-shirt that says, “Mac my Day” and another that says, “Friends don’t let friends use Windows.” I admire Bill Gates in many ways and I do all I can to keep any of my money from reaching any of his accounts. I tend to use Open Source software on OS X where I can, another trait I trace to my years as a MacZealot.

I could go on and on. In fact, I already have. I have tons of Apple-related memories. But I just wanted to share a sampling of them here in honor of Apple’s 30th. Apple is the longest-lasting non-family constant in my life.

I’m glad they’re on the planet.

San Jose Mercury News sports columnist Mark Purdy this morning forecast the coming baseball season as The Unhappiest Season on Earth. His feeling is that every few days more bad news will spew out of the newly announced investigation into Barry Bonds, thinly disguised as a general probe of steroid use in baseball, and that fans will grow increasingly dismayed, bitter and angry. They’ll still go to the parks, he says, but they won’t be happy when they’re there.

I wonder. It is often the case that travails of this type bother the media more than the public. That observation is hardly confined to sports. The sports writers and broadcasters who spend all day thinking about very little other than sports are hardly typical of the fan for whom baseball is an escape, a deviation from the otherwise potentially dull and at least repetitive routine that masquerades as Life for most of us.

How will you react? How will I? I have some thoughts on the subject.

I’m not a typical fan. As a longtime sports writer and columnist and a person who, as you can see from the content of this blog, spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and writing about sports, I have a sense that I’m sort of a hybrid, a cross between a sports writer and a typical fan. I’m a serious fan but I’m also a journalist at heart. So my reactions may not be a good bellwether of how you and other more typical fans will feel as this season drags out.

But my take is that most fans won’t be the gloom-and-doom sulkers that Purdy expects to fill the stands at America’s ballparks this spring. While most if not all fans would agree that illegal steroid use ought to be punished and that it’s tainted the game, the fact is that this is not the huge story Purdy and his ilk wish to paint. Why? I think there are at least three reasons.

First, it’s old hat. Anyone who has been paying attention to the game in the past decade or so is certainly aware that normal people, unaided by performance-enhancing drugs of some sort, don’t typically balloon up in size and develop massive muscles over one off-season. On some level, the sports writers who point out that baseball has turned a blind eye to the problem for many years are giving the lie to the notion that this story will somehow destroy the coming season for fans. The fans have known about this stuff and have been talking about it longer than most of the writers, at least from outward indications.

Second, there’s a lot of gray area here about the criminality or legal status of what the players did when they took steroids. Until 2002, the league didn’t have any rule about steroid use at all. And it wasn’t until 2004 that the game had a rule with some teeth to it. In fact, the Non-Commissioner, Bud Selig, has charged the Mitchell Commission with investigating what has happened in the field of steroids since 2002. If what the players did wasn’t against any established and enforced rule, fans will think, what’s the big deal?

Third, even the most rabid fan knows that baseball, like all pro sports, is more about entertainment than it is about quaint notions like fairness and sportsmanship. I know that’s cynical and unfortunate, but that doesn’t make it less true. Where’s the fairness in George Steinbrenner being able to buy as powerful a team as he wants without any interference from other owners or the pathetic commissioner’s office? Where’s the fairness in having every single media outlet focus in its nightly baseball coverage on the mammoth home runs, an act which clearly perpetuates any conduct that will get a player noticed in that way?

I expect bad news to dribble out of the Mitchell Commission as the season progresses. And there’s no doubt the media will keep the story on the front sports pages and on the front burner, not because the story is meritorious of such treatment but because it’s what sports writers do best: sensationalize. But I suspect the fans will, by and large, shrug it off, go to the park, eat too many hot dogs (is there such a thing?) and enjoy the exploits of their heroes, juiced or not.

We’ll know in a few weeks whether Purdy is right or whether my prediction of fan behavior is more on target than his.

Meanwhile, can’t we just play a little baseball?

Last year, even without Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants might have been respectable if they’d had a decent closer. Oh, there were other holes in the lineup, to be sure, and their manager remains in my view a bit of a buffoon whose baseball knowledge is ancient. But if they’d had a closer, they could probably have won 8-12 games they lost last season. The fact that they only finished seven games out in the weakest division in baseball means that a decent closer could have made them contenders.

But it also means they could have been borderline respectable.

This year, as last, the team is counting on the veteran Armando Benitez to slam the door on opponents in the 9th inning of close games. Last year, Benitez was injured most of the season, and the closer role was never adequately filled. Benitez needed to have a great spring to enable fans to breathe a sigh of relief. Instead, what did we get? This fireballing closer posted an ERA of. . .are you sitting down?. . .25.41. That’s not a typo. Let me spell it out. Twenty-five point forty-one. Translate that to a one-inning appearance and you get almost three runs per inning pitched. If he comes into close games and gives up three runs, he loses the game for the G-men.

Where do the Giants turn if Benitez can’t cut it?

Benitez is injured again. He’s suffering a sore left knee. If he goes down again or is ineffective, the job probably goes to Tim Worrell, who in 2003 racked up 38 saves. A young hot-hand doing AAA duty in Fresno, Merkin Valdez, is being groomed for the closer spot at some point and could figure in this year as well.

But mark my words. If Benitez isn’t the effective closer the Giants need this year, they’ll be mired in the middle of the standings anyway, with or without Barry Bonds.

The NFL — aka the No Fun League — has voted to tighten restrictions on touchdown celebrations in the coming season, apparently at the request of the players union. Jealousy is clearly at work here. Some guys are really good at coming up with creative ways of celebrating a touchdown. Those who either aren’t so good at it or never get a chance to score a TD are apparently pissed. So now we have the spectacle of the players’ union asking the team owners to put stricter limits on TD outbreaks. Yeesh. You’d think these guys would have better things to do with their time.

Actually, they did make some useful and substantive rules changes in the same meeting, but this one grabbed the headlines. I have to say, this bewilders me. It feels like an attempt to stop showboating and individual creative expression, which in turn feels like unnecessary prior censorship. And the penalty is way too stiff: 15-yard unsportsmanlike on the ensuing kickoff.

Next thing you know they’ll be requiring them to wear shirts and ties. On the field.

I say again. Yeesh.

Who’d have believed that the GOP-contolled U.S. Senate would have the courage to buck the Bush Regime on a hot-button issue like immigration reform? But the Senate Judiciary Committee did just that today, adopting a Democratic-sponsored amendment to the House-passed immigration bill that strips a provision that would have made anyone who helped an illegal immigrant guilty of a crime.

The committee adopted an amendment by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that would protect church and charitable groups, as well as individuals, from criminal prosecution for providing food, shelter, medical care and counseling to undocumented immigrants, according to wire service reports.

I’d like to think that nationwide demonstrations by hundreds of thousands over the weekend had an impact but I doubt that was the case. Regardless of the cause, though, I’m glad to see sanity prevail in this case.

Every once in a whle, I run across a newspaper piece that reminds me how old I’m getting. Today’s San Jose Mercury-News has a piece reprinted from the Dallas Morning News headlined “Online news use booming, especially among young”. That’s cool. I get a lot of my news online these days. But it’s not my primary news source by any stretch.

According to this article, “among the heaviest Internet users” (and I’d quality for that epithet on at least a couple of levels), 71 percent go online for news, compared to 59 percent who watch local TV news and about 38 percent who turn to local newspapers.

What’s up with that? I compared my habits to those described in the article, which was describing a Pew study.

I get 75% or more of my news from local newspapers. I read at least one every day. Very often I read part of another and on a good day I read substantially all of two different papers. What about local TV news? Zip. Nada. Never watch it. And I mean never. I’ve never liked TV as a news medium. Probably a carryover from the days when I was a dailly newspaper reporter-editor and I found TV news to be too shallow. And that was when TV was actually doing real journalism, something it hasn’t seen in a couple of decades as far as I can tell.

But I also don’t watch national TV news much at all. Unless there’s a major breaking event that’s got my attention — or unless you count sports as news — I seldom turn on a TV to get news.

The news I get that doesn’t come from the newspaper comes online in two primary forms. First, I check into news on Yahoo! several times a day. Second, I have a few friends like former ABC News Producer Tony Seton who email me in-depth pieces fairly regularly. And I am a member of a number of progressive political groups that toss news my way several times a week as well.

Once again, I defy the stereotype. I’m not young by most peoples’ standards and I certainly am a heavy Internet user but I still turn to print for most of my news. Wonder what that says about me other than that I would skew all the numbers in any poll designed to find out where Americans get their news.

I’m glad my son Tomas pointed me at the current_tv site for independent TV and video content. One of those that was greenlit and is now showing on their network is a very moving four-minute video of hope for the future of our country despite the current socio-political situation. Check it out.

Be prepared. It’s moving and it will get you emotional.

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the best sports commissioner since his predecessor Pete Rozelle, has announced he’s retiring in July. He’s accomplished every single goal he set out to accomplish…and a bunch more.

In fact, Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports penned one of the most positive tributes to a sports exec I’ve ever read. And I can’t disagree with a single word of it. Football is safely ensconced as the Number 1 spectator sport in America and baseball is mired in third (or fourth) place behind non-Commissioner Bud Selig.

He’s going to be tough to replace but you want to know something? I bet he’s already had his successor in place and groomed. He’s that good.

Late Addition: Yep, he already had his successor in place. Check it out.

I don’t watch the TV show, “Boston Legal.” I love William Shatner but I hate his character, Denny Crane. Beyond that, I found the show to be too over the top most of the time. I may have to reconsider. Some of my friends tell me it’s one of the better legal shows on TV though you sometimes have to separate out a good bit of chaff to find the wheat.

Here’s a particularly excellent closing argument made by one of the characters in defense of a tax protester. Where are the voices like this in the streets and on the campuses of our country?

Thanks to Tony Seton for the pointage.

I grew up in Detroit. I worked that region as a sports writer for many years. While I would never go back there even for a visit (I might get there on a day other than the two or three good weather days they get there), I still have tiny heart micro-ties to that area. And I still ache with Detroit sports fans who have waited so long for a national title in almost anything.

But I predict that the Lions, who have the NFL’s worst record since 2001 (21-59), will be respectable this year. And I have a sneaky feeling they may even be contenders in another season or two. Why?

They got rid of Joey Harrington. And they hired Mike Martz, whose offensive style is ideally suited to the two remaining QBs, Cade McKown and Jon Kitna. Neither of those guys is, by himself, a super-hero signal-caller. But I just have a hunch that behind a coach like Martz (who is much stronger as an offensive coordinator than as a head coach), either of these guys could turn into a well-above-average player.

And that could be enough to restore Detroit to respectability, something they haven’t had for…let me see now…about 50 years!