Bring out the champagne glasses, do cart wheels, plank. Whatever. We’re ecstatic and honoured to be informed by gargantuan “online magazine rack” content aggregator Alltop, co-founded by none other than master marketer and author Guy Kawasaki that vernonchan.com is joining the likes of TUAW, MacWorld, MacNN, Macrumors and Appleinsider in the Apple category. Being a huge personal fan of Guy since “Selling the Dream” and “The Macintosh Way” days, this is certainly a milestone which inspires me to write better and do bigger, better things.
Guy Kawasaki is no stranger to the Apple world, being the former official Chief Apple Evangelist (a role never before seen in the history of Apple). Oh by the way, LIKE his latest book “Enchantment” on Facebook to download “The Macintosh Way” book for free.
My love for Apple goes far beyond its products alone. Its culture and philosophy of making beautiful, desirable, creative, simple things has seen this deep fondness and respect for the Cupertino company through 2 decades.
My first knowledge of Apple goes way back to 1984, in the glory days of the Made-in-Taiwan Lingo 128 PC. I spotted the Macintosh all-in-one and I told my dad, “I want that.” My first encounter with the Mac didn’t surface until 1993 though. It was then the first PowerPC 601 processor-powered series hit the market. The PowerPC of course, was the alliance between Apple, IBM and Motorola. The PPC 6100 I first played with belonged to my college senior, which cost a horrendous amount of money at that time, but was revolutionary. Ran System 7. Before long I was going through system files and extensions to tweak the machine for him. Keyboard shortcuts were learned very quickly, something the Mac excelled at. Yes, the geekiness started way back then.
Several years later, I purchased my first ever Mac. Then a powerhouse of a desktop – the PowerMac 8600 tower, with its 604e processor running at a blazing 250Mhz, 1GB RAM and 8MB of VRAM. It had great expandability, though no match to the top-of-the-line 9600 (which had 6 PCI expansion slots) – the machine of choice for creative pros. It ran Mac OS 8.6 (upgraded). I remember playing Myst on it, and first dabbled with Macromind (later Macromedia) Director, Dreamweaver and Futuresplash Animator (which later evolved into Macromedia Flash). 6 months down the line, Apple introduced the ground-breaking beige “Gossamer” Powermac G3s which saw a new motherboard with a faster system bus, a third-generation “G3” PowerPC CPU (PowerPC 750), using a completely different type of memory, backside cache and included a personality card slot. It was also the first time Apple shipped a PowerMac with a high-speed EIDE drive, which rivalled Apple’s own SCSI-2 drives.
The mid-to-late 90s was also the time when I ran an Apple site called MacNutt, which was handcoded in HTML using BBEdit, and ran off free Geocities (yes it was that long ago). This was the site that got me a job at the Apple reseller where I originally bought my PowerMac from, a year or so before. It was there where I was graphic/web designer, Apple sales rep, and also technical support! I loved it. I also co-founded Macclub.net with my ex-boss, a Mac community site. Self-hosted on our Mac server running Quid Pro Quo (remember that?) and Filemaker Server. Awesome stuff.
Several years later, I started MacXcess.com (1999-2002) when I was based in London for over two years. Thanks to the active Mac scene there I had a chance to attend some good events including lining up like an idiot to grab the first copy of Mac OS X 10.0. and also review cool stuff. MacXcess.com had a pretty solid following, and was aggregated by MacSurfer.com. Appleinsider once sent me email saying, “Love your writing style!”. In its heyday, MacXcess.com was one of the Top 50 Mac sites in the world, as listed by Lowendmac.com.
How things have changed. Yet not.
The Alltop listing is a BIG deal. At least for me. Is it reason to celebrate? Hell yes! I’d like to first personally thank Advertlets who have been supportive of vernonchan.com, the awesome Rebecca Saw, PR/Media firms (you know who you are), my peers in the tech world (yes you), friends and all my fans and readers. You’re awesome. Thanks for the support. While this is cause for some celebration, ultimately, it inspires and motivates me to work even harder to be better. 🙂
Swag. Goodies. Freebies. Giveaways.
I’m in a generous mood. I’ve got iTunes credit, Boomwave iPhone 4 and iPad cases, Starbucks gift vouchers and more to give away every Wednesday from next week, July 13 till August 31. All you need to do is LIKE my Facebook page (and follow me on Twitter if you will) and wait for further instructions. Cool?
