Happy Anniversary Mac!

macIn 1982 I graduated from High school and got a job at a print shop as a driver. The company was new and thanks to the business climate they grew real fast. I was able to move up really quickly and they gave me opportunities to learn a trade. I did a three and a half-year apprenticeship in film assembly, known in the business as a stripper. (No jokes about the other version of a stripper) Just as I was completing my time a big shift was coming in the business, the owner started buying computers and image setters to output what some people were sending us on disk. Until that time what I had done was all done by hand, yet within a few years all of that business changed over to computers. I sold a jet ski to pay for the purchase of a Macintosh computer a “CI” and I enrolled at the community college to take computer classes at night. I watched the business go from taking weeks and hundreds of dollars to produce a brochure to taking a few hours. The company I worked for struggled like many companies did until it closed as more and more of this work consolidated into new faster smaller shops that could produce the jobs cheaper. Today the entire Pre-press industry is gone. Mine is just one story, there are many more stories of how the last thirty years of computers changed the business landscape. Not just some of business has changed, every aspect of how we now do business has changed accounting to shipping there isn’t a department that isn’t using computers and other tech to do things faster, cheaper and better! As Apple celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the Macintosh, I am grateful I was able to grow and learn my way into a new field of work, and I can’t help but wonder what the next thirty will look like?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *