I started what is now Flightpath on one of Steve Jobs’ early inventions.
It was 1994 and I had a boxy little monochrome Mac SE with 4 MB of RAM, my cat, and a 14.4 dial-up modem. I started using the web before there was a mosaic/gui browser. There was a whole lot of clicking the spacebar to proceed through text. One day, after watching me click away for months, my cat jumped up on my desk and started clicking the spacebar – surfing the web. (Jobs gets a lot of credit for making devices so intuitive that kids can use them. Who knew they were easy enough for cats?)
Eventually, I traded my SE for a sleek Mac Quadra with a color monitor that I rode for a few years, before eventually succumbing and living with a series of crappy Gateway and Dell PCs.
About two weeks ago, I finally got my first new Mac in more than 10 years and it rocks. I’m ordering my iPhone 4S tomorrow. But what I’d really like to get my hands on is a vintage copy of the Whole Earth Catalog – something I guess I’d always heard of but never knew much about until reading about it in one of the Steve Jobs obituaries. Apparently, many facets of the Whole Earth zeitgeist informed Steve’s worldview (DIY, community-aware, creative, self-sustainable). If nothing else, I’ll start following them on Twitter (@wholeearth).