Walt Mossberg Quotes

Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.

I started on an Apple II, which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4,500 a year, and I spent half of it on the computer.

The reason I'm an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn't wait for the Powerbook.

Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone.

The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

I was fortunate that I came out to the Valley in 1979, when I came out to go to Stanford Business School, and my very first assignment as a teaching assistant for an investments professor was to - he told me go down to this computer company in Cupertino called Apple.

Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

Just remember, in 1973, we had no digital cameras, no personal computers, no Internet. The thought of putting a billion transistors in a cell phone was ludicrous.

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

We've seen the power of the PC, and we've seen that it's unstoppable.

I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.

I got my first computer at, I don't know, when I was 11 years old? 10?

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

Certainly, because the computer and computer language was still not as common as it is today. That's one of the reasons I believe Tron wasn't as popular back then as it is today.

I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.