Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc.

When I was hired on May 13, 1996, I was 20 years old, a week shy of 21. I was hired on to the Mac System Integration team, which was responsible for “System Updates”: the kinds of OS upgrades fellow Mac old-timers will remember being associated with the file in your System Folder called the “System Enabler”. Essentially it was a collection of patches to the main System File (and ROM) that fixed bugs, added features, etc.

At that time I had already worked in the same general area as a Quality Assurance engineer, contributing to the System 7.5 (“Capone”) release. It was called “Capone” in response to Microsoft giving Windows 95 the codename “Chicago”. Watch out, Chicago, we’re coming for you. Another project at the time alluded to Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow was wrongly accused of causing the great Chicago fire of 1871. The playful competition between Apple and Microsoft was still alive and well. From our side, at least.

I went on to work for Apple through the release of Mac OS 8, and then to the Mac OS X team where I worked on the very earliest adaptions of the Code Fragment Manager (for Classic Mac OS binaries), Folder Manager, and various fixes to the CarbonCore framework, part of Core Services. Our offices were right next to the Foundation and AppKit teams, and once or twice I was allowed to make microscopic contributions to that team’s work, primarily to the NSURL networking support code.

I quit in 2002, shortly after Apple released the first iPod MP3 player. I was antsy. Only 26 years old by that time, I wanted to go back to school for another college degree, this time in music. It’s funny to think back now at how “done” I thought our work at the company was. I was looking at the future through Mac-colored lenses, and it seemed as though everything important had been done. We had just pulled off the miracle of transitioning from classic Mac to OS X, and I knew we were in the process of moving to Intel processors. What else could the company possibly do, aside from making incremental improvements? Little did I know.

I love to consider the past with the well-known mental device that Merlin Mann calls a “chronanalogy”. This is the method of appreciating the magnitude of time that has passed since a certain date by imagining the same amount of time having passed back then. In this context, as I think back on my start date, I can compare the feeling to how somebody on that day might have reflected on their memories of May 13, 1966. The Rolling Stones had just released “Paint it Black”. The Vietnam War was raging. Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive and actively campaigning for civil rights in America.

In another 30 years, with any luck, I’ll be 80 years old. A week shy of 81. I’ll think back at the impossibility that an entire 60 years has elapsed since my first day at Apple. I can’t imagine what the company, let alone what society at large, might have achieved by then. I hope it’s good.