Resurrecting my blog for a special occasion…

So, Apple. 50 years old today and I can genuinely say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. And that “where” is in New Jersey, visiting my partner who I met over 25 years ago when we both worked for the same Apple reseller and she came to he UK to train some of my Windows using colleagues how to support Macs.

My Apple journey started in 1986, when I arrived at Aston University and first used a Mac. Aston was part of the Apple University Consortium and even had an Apple Reseller based in the Guild of Students, more about them later, so there were Apple suites all over the place. The first time that I got on the Internet was using an SE/30 in the library and logging onto sites such as FUNET and WUARCHIVE to download fonts and sound clips. Not that we could download them directly back then. First you had to get on a VAX terminal, log onto the site remotely, get it to push the files to Imperial, from where you could download it on to the Mac.

Come 1989 and we bought a Mac Plus, with a second-hand 400K external drive, from Ruth and Dilip in that reseller in the Guild. Two years later I would find myself working alongside them at Second City Systems. Originally I was there providing temporary cover for someone who had gone to Afghanistan to get married and never came back, the rest is history as they say. I think he was offered a large tract of land as a dowery, or something like that. That was my second attempt to work for them after Jon Tack declined to hire me to work in sales, and I ended up doing demos for the person that got the job. I was tasked with learning an early version of Quark XPress in a day or two so in order to demo it.

After SCS were wound up I moved on to Leicester Computer Centre and I have to thank Steve Birch for vouching for me when Nick Lowe called him to see what I was like.

LCC was fun and I not only go to play with kit like the QuickTake 100, which was used to take the first pic (above) that I have of my journey, behind a Quadra 700 with a portrait display and early CD writer, but I also set up two of the not very many AWS 95 servers (running AU/X) that ended up in the UK as well as getting to design and implement a rather hacked together system which regularly dialled up to Demon Internet to download email and then distribute it to the QuickMail servers at the three offices by having them dial each other a couple of times an hour. This was cutting edge stuff at the time.

After LCC it was on to MicroWarehouse / MacWarehouse and more new tech to play with when we launched the first iMac at The Capital Cafe in Leicester Square. It was about a week after the US launch, which meant that by the time we ran the event you could actually print to a USB printer as the relevant drivers had been updated. After NeXT were purchased by Apple I was sent not only a copy of OS X Server 1.0 but also a multiport ethernet card to play with so that I could familiarise myself with things like NetBoot. Having a room of 20-30 multi-coloured iMacs all booting up together from a Blue & White G3 for a client who was setting up a web publishing business was a sight to behold.

MicroWarehouse was also where I got to learn how to run a phone queue when we were descended on by a number of colleagues from the US who came to tell us, as we saw it, what we were doing wrong. All my PC colleagues were cross trained on Mac, the Mac support people already having to cover Windows, by Melissa Drew and my head was certainly turned, though we weren’t to actually get together for another 17 years or so, and we bonded over Apple and sci-fi.

Apple didn’t have any courses for OS X to begin with, so I convinced my boss to send me on RedHat training, on the basis that OS X was BSD UNIX under the hood. My AU/X experience also helped and it was Zero to RHCE in six weeks flat.

There was more NetBooting, plus NetInstall, in 2008 when I used it to deploy 50+ MacPro video editing workstations for a satellite broadcaster. These were editing directly off an Xserve over ethernet. Performance was OK but it would have been much better if we had deployed Xsan. Never mind, I got to put in a few Xsan infrastructures and even got called into Abbey Road to fix one that another company had set up. I always liked playing with the new stuff.

I also got my first taste of product management and marketing after the UK arm of MicroWarehouse were bough by DSG and I was tasked with taking all of the packaged PC services that DSG offered and making replicas for the Mac. Artwork designed, products merchandised and training for a lot of field engineers organised. I also got my first taste of writing commercially, regularly contributing multi-page articles to the MacWarehouse magazine as well as having a monthly column in MacFormat.

On to Insight as Technical Manager and, later, Apple Business Manger. Where I was regularly writing advertising copy, presenting to customers and colleagues and even coming up with the concept for several stands at client showcases. I also got to architect and manage what was, at the time, one of the the largest iPad deployments in the UK, something which also took me to Singapore and Hong Kong to teach the local teams what we were doing.

For a couple of years after I was an independent consultant, helping resellers navigate working with Apple and businesses understand how to get the most out of their investment in Apple.

One of those clients took me on full time with the goal of sorting out their Mac device management, which is how I find myself now working for BluePrism and lately SS&C Technologies after they purchased them.

Today I spend almost half of every year in the US and fill my time with using Intune to manage PCs, iOS and Android, though I still work on a Mac and I’m using everything that I’ve learned from working with Apple for over 30 years to make the experience for my users as good as I can. Just because they use Windows doesn’t meant mean that we can’t make their experience as good as possible.

And all thanks to Apple.