It occurs to me that sometime last month marked the 28th anniversary of the day my then-spouse, who had already shot her credibility two years earlier by persuading me to purchase an Apple ][+ (a machine I came to loathe bitterly within half a year of its ill-advised purchase), tricked me into meeting her at the software house in Berkeley that employed her at that time. I myself was already on the payroll of Flatline, Comatose, Torpor & Drowse. When I arrived, she pretended to have a late meeting, and left me in an empty office with a first-gen Macintosh running MacPaint. She returned half an hour later. "Where do I sign?"

Three years later she had left me for a youngster who now, oddly enough, occupies a fairly lofty post at Apple, and I was actually making a full-time living on a Mac SE, an only marginally evolved successor to that original plastic tombstone. Since then, twenty-five years ago, I've made my way through a succession of loftier Macs, employer-underwritten until the disastrous merger in 2003; purchased on my dime thereafter. But hey, what the hell? The 2008 iMac on which I enter these sentiments is in every respect a worthy successor to the ungainly tombstones on which I cut my teeth so long ago. I had no idea back in 1984, in that office overlooking Shattuck Avenue, that I'd been introduced to my livelihood for the remainder of the game.

cordially,