I’m starting a series of blog posts inspired by a Facebook post I made — and the subsequent comments — on June 21, 2020. That happened to be Father’s Day here in the U.S. I posted a photo of myself with my brother Mark and my father John wishing them both a happy Father’s Day. In the photo all three of us have new T-shirts draped over our chests that my mother Judy gave us. The solid black shirts have three simple words screen printed in white on the front: “I’m a Mac”. We were — and still are — Mac users and avid Apple fans.

A Facebook friend commented, “Curious, what does ‘Mac’ mean?”

I replied: “Mac is short for Macintosh, as in Apple’s personal computer. ‘I’m a Mac’ is in reference to the series of Get a Mac TV commercials featuring John Hodgman as a PC and Justin Long as a Mac that ran from 2006 to 2009.”

What follows is the rest of my reply, added to and edited for this first installment of “My Mac Story”.

The Beginning

My Mac story starts in the fall of 1984. My wife and I were living in Portland, Oregon at the time. We had traveled to my parents’ home in Fremont, California for Thanksgiving. My aunt Ruth (my dad’s sister) and uncle A.J. from Fountain Valley, California (in Orange County near L.A.) were also there.

My uncle was an engineer and computer programer for McDonald Douglas. He had an original Macintosh 128 and was leaning how to write software for it.

He brought it with him to show my dad, but I was also entranced. I spent hours over the holiday weekend playing with MacPaint and eventually recreated a logo I had recently designed for JJC Ministries* in tiny black and white pixels on the 9-inch (512 x 342) monochrome display.

The Macintosh obviously made an impression on me. But it was way out of my price range at the time and the professional graphic art environment in which I worked was still fully analog — drafting tables, Rapidographs, rubylith, and dark room with a process camera, photo chemicals, and hand-set typography equipment.

I didn’t think much about computer graphics at all until I was sent on a business trip to a 3M-sponsored design conference in Redondo Beach, California in 1986. One of our field trips was to the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. There we got to sit and play in a computer lab for exploring early digital design tools. It was equipped with Apple IIGS computers running what was essentially a color version of MacPaint. It was fun, but I did not come away from that experience nearly as captivated as I was with my uncle’s Macintosh.

I didn’t have too long to wait until I got to use a Mac again, however. In the summer of 1987, my employer at the time, Gillespie Decals, Inc., purchased Macintosh SEs for the production art department.

It was a two-floppy diskette model and we used System 4.2 initially with MacDraw software to create small, simple label art, printed it out on a 300dpi LaserWriter, then took the black and white output to the darkroom process camera to create the transparencies needed for the printing processes being used in the plant (screen, flex, and/or hot stamp). Later that year we added external SCSI 40 MB (that’s megabytes) hard drives and the first version of Adobe Illustrator, which was an amazing leap from MacDraw for vector graphics.

Later that year I took out a personal loan and bought the identical model for home and “I’m a Mac” ever since.

There’s more to come, so stay tuned to this blog for more installments of “My Mac Story”.

* “JJC” stands for Jesus, Joy, and Clowns. In a former life I was involved with the Christian clowning movement, but that’s a topic for a completely different blog.