Alan Graham's life recounted one computer at a time

Mark Frauenfelder 5:07 pm Fri Mar 30, 2007

On Alan Graham's new blog MedHed, he posts photos of every personal computer he's owned over time along with anecdotes that occurred at the time he owen them.

Macintosh IIvx

After dropping out of college and spending two years flying airplanes and helicopters (while managing a pizza place), I got a bee in my bonnet to buy a computer. I walked into a store that sold Macintosh computers and walked out $5,000 poorer with an Apple Mac IIvx. It was a pretty big deal because it was the first Mac built to house an internal CD-ROM drive, and the first time I had even seen one.

Through a chance encounter I ended up starting a computer repair and consulting company. In the early days I would often secretly peek into my repair bag at David Pogue's Mac for Dummies book to diagnose my clients problems.

"Ah yes…I think this is a problem with an extention…one moment while I look into my bag here….uh huh…yes definitely an extention."

[Note: many years later I had the great privilege to do R&D for the first two versions of David's Missing Manual: OS X book. How funny is that story arc?]

Within a year I was a Mac authorized VAR and Apple Authorized repair technician. And not long after that I was one of the leading digital video experts in the country.

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