(This month’s Networking Times editorial):

Eighteen years ago, in December 1993, I wrote a little editorial for Upline magazine to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, a device that had transformed my life in ways strikingly similar to the way network marketing had done.

It was exactly ten years ago. They claimed it was going to change how we work, how we play, even how we think. Gone were the Greek-to-me “A>:” prompts, and in their place were a smiling face, little “icons” of familiar objects, and a thing they called a “mouse.” All you had to do, they said, was “point and click,” and it would let you draw, write, calculate—and create! It was, they said, the computer “for the rest of us.”

When I learned about the Mac and what it could do—and more importantly, what it would enable me to do—I was a struggling publisher of a small journal on health and the environment called Solstice. In those days, I printed out my articles in two-inch-wide columns of text, which I then cut up with a utility knife and laid out on paperboard with paper cement. This was 1986, when “cut and paste” and “desktop” were not metaphors but descriptions of what we physically did and where we physically did it.

It took months and a friend to cosign the bank note, but I managed to buy a Mac Plus and introduce myself to the wonders of page layout software…

To read the rest of this editorial, click here (no charge, but registration required).