Bill Budge Quotes

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

I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.

My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.

I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.

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.

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.

Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.

My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.

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.

There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

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

When I was 8 or 9, I started using bulletin board systems, which was the precursor to the Internet, where you'd dial into... a shared system and shared computers. I've had an email address since the late '80s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then I got on the Internet in '93 when it was first starting out.

I remember watching my dad work on PCs, and I remember using Texas Instrument calculators in school. It was a bit nostalgic.

I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.

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.

I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, 'Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.' Thousands of people.

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

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.

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

My first Macintosh was a 128k machine which I upgraded to 512k the minute it became possible.

Right at the start, when I was about 13 or 14, I only had an Amiga 500 Plus running a bit of tracker software called OctaMED. My brother was big into his computers, and when he moved up to a proper PC, I took charge of the Amiga.

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

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