Community Blog

Back in 1987, my typewriter broke. A friend who worked in one of the new desktop publishing companies told me to not even think about getting another one. They had been rendered redundant and ridiculous. I hardly felt in a financial position to agree, but he cunningly brought home a Macintosh from his work, which was closed down for the Christmas break, and said "Use this for two weeks before you make up your mind".

I was absolutely hooked. Line and sinker. When the chance came to work from home I took redundancy from the prepress company I worked at, and spent all my money on a Mac Plus. I spent the next few months teaching myself all I could, and soon I had launched a free Auckland what's-on and opinion magazine (called Stamp) and I was doing desktop publishing privately, plus writing about music and wine.

I soon met Greg Vincent who had just started Parkside Publishing, and the rest is history - Greg launched NZ Classic Car magazine (which I designed for two years in my garden shed) and now the company is a major independent publisher with the titles NZ Performance Car magazine, Tone and NZ Macguide magazine also in the stable.

It was a strange world as far as Apple went, really, in New Zealand in those days. Traditional film-based prepress and typesetting companies who didn't embrace Macs soon went under (as the one I had resigned from duly did. Note: although I might sound like a hoary old salt to some, there were many using Macs here years before me).

Many of the first dealers had been almost painfully levered over from the suit-and-tie corporate computer world and looked most uncomfortable when confronted by the dishevelled acolytes such as myself.

You see, Apple was always a maverick. Engineers pulled them apart and marvelled at the neat, classy designs of the innards while the rest of us just marvelled at the cute outsides - and at all we could do with them. Apple's business culture likewise defined itself, in the US, in a new way, eschewing Big Blue corporate trappings.

And that's what Apple still does - it welcomes new users (as we do), and the company's undeniably funky, powerful machines open up a wealth of possibilities to all who are open to them. Mac sales are going up in New Zealand and things have never looked better - Apple computers are part of our publishing, design, sound and television industries like never before, and they have energised small businesses and communications - not to mention entertainment - from Bluff to the Far North.

It's all very exciting to be part of.