I started at Rice University in the fall of 1983. I had been a music major at University of Miami the year before, and I went to the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston doing music, but I had always done both computers and music, and I realized two things when I was at Miami:
Most of the musicians I met were not happy and most of my friends that were going to Rice were.
It’s a lot easier to buy saxophones as a computer programmer than it is to buy them as a musician.
So I decided I wanted to be a computer programmer. I was hoping to program something cool, like something in the space program, but was willing to settle for working at banks or the government or some such. It did not occur to me that one could make a living programming personal computers. I had messed around with Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 2 computers in both junior high and high school, but I did not take them seriously.
That all changed in January-February of 1984.
I did not see the Apple SuperBowl commercial. I did not have a TV, and none of my Rice buddies cared about football. But I heard about it the next couple of days. And within a couple of weeks of the introduction of the Mac, Rice had them.
Rice had a central computer building, where the various mainframe and minicomputers that were available for classes and other work. It had two big rooms with banquet tables and chairs. There were terminals on these tables, packed very close to each other, and inside metal cages bolted to the tables.
One weekend, they removed the last two terminals on one side of each row, and replaced them with Macs (they caged those as well). You would go to the Campus Store, and buy floppy disks with the system on them, and you could then go up to a Mac, turn it on, and put in your disk.
I was completely hooked. My coursework was done in UNIX on terminals with Emacs as the editor. The text was Blue on Black. There were no graphics. It was cold.
This new…. thing… (was it a computer? really?), had graphics. And sound. It had this thing called a mouse, which you used to drive the interface. You double-clicked on things to make them do something. You could draw. You could type. In different fonts (what’s a font?). When you printed, it looked just like what was on the screen. Best of all, you could play.
I decided I wanted to work writing cool software for these cool computers.
I had no extra money in college, and Macs were expensive. I still did all of my coursework on the VAX computers using a terminal, but I played with the Macs Rice had a LOT. I used MacPaint to write music. I used MacWrite to write papers (my typewriter got very lonely). I played a lot of games as well.
My first job was writing software for a company that a classmate of mine started, called StyleWare. Apple had shipped the Apple IIGS, which had a Mac interface on top of the Apple II. StyleWare was writing software for it. It wasn’t the Mac, but it did get me familiar with Apple’s interfaces and paradigms. When Claris bought the company, I moved to California, and once were done for good with AppleWorks GS, I started working on FileMaker. On the Mac.
I had achieved my goal.