John Suder

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for longer than I’d like to admit. Apple products have been a part of my work (and life) since 1986. I learned ‘desktop publishing’ (a new phrase back then) on the original Macintosh Plus, using Aldus PageMaker 1.0. It ran on a single floppy, which I still have somewhere, buried deep in the archives.

The Macintosh radically transformed how I worked. At the time, I was a graphic designer just getting started in the business. When you needed type, you had to spec it, and order it from a type house. If you fucked up, you had to do it over. If you needed an illustration, you hired an actual illustrator. Art wasn’t sent on disc, it was prepared on boards, with overlays and color keys and rubylith (I can hear the old heads groaning). Having a good eye and quick knife skills were critical to your success. To meet a deadline, your job most likely depended on what time the FedEx guy made his last pickup. More than once I had a boss who said, “If it isn’t done on time, you’re taking a ride to the airport (to the FedEx hangar).”

To say that this little computer made my life easier would be a grand understatement. It also opened doors of creativity and allowed for more experimentation – and most importantly – cut down the amount of time to prepare art for print production. And besides that, it was fun. Of course, there were challenges and growing pains. Now that we could do our work faster, more was expected of us. And where did we store all those files? Those floppies filled up fast, external storage needed to be added. As we added more Macs to our department, we networked them together with AppleTalk cables strung thru the drop ceiling, using an external 20 MB (yes, Megabyte) Hard Drive as our file server and a giant Apple LaserWriter as our printer.

Eventually, the Mac Pluses were no longer fast enough. We needed power! We needed Mac SE’s…then Mac IIci’s…MacIIsi’s…Quadras,LCs (the Pizza Box Macs) and PowerMacs. I’ve had the opportunity to use or tear apart pretty much every model Apple put out. I’ve even used the Apple QuickTake, one of the first consumer digital cameras on the market. The quality sucked, but you could see the possibilities. I briefly owned a Newton (again, another idea with great promise).

Fast forward to today. Being self-employed, I can only salivate over the latest models announced at Mac World. I’ll just have to make do with my G5, my first-generation iPhone and my trusty white PowerBook. I can’t imagine doing my job ‘the old fashioned way’.

All these years later, I still find using a Mac exciting and fun, and we have Steve Jobs and the amazing company he founded to thank for it. Unfortunately, the media as of late have been focusing on his health ( a popular headline: “Is Steve Jobs Dying?”). Yes, Steve is ill, and he does have an obligation to his shareholders to disclose certain information about his health. But Steve is a smart guy, and if he passes or decides to permanently retire, a transition plan is in place. I’d just hope that the media would respect Steve’s privacy, let him recover and deal with his health issues in private, but sadly that’s not the kind of society we live in.

Happy Birthday, Steve. Get well soon.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs