I couldn’t take it anymore! For years, I had fantasized about a device that would allow me to communicate, inform, and stay entertained, but would fit in my pocket. Way back in 1994, I was excited by the prospects for Apple’s Newton PDA. Even though it was a bit vague, I did love using it. I think we still have two or three of them hiding in a closet somewhere.

It saddened me when a struggling Apple Computer stopped making them. I never gave up hope that the company would one day revisit the concept of a handheld computer.

In the interim, I busied myself with poor substitutes, like a series of Palm Pilots, followed by a couple of Treos (at one point I was tempted by a Blackberry, but never succumbed). Finally, in frustration I gave up on handheld computing and bought a regular cell phone.

Then, in about 2004, rumors started flying around the web about a mysterious new product from Apple. There was talk of a Macintosh tablet computer, or maybe just a micro Mac with a folding keyboard. A few crazy people even went so far as to fear eyes that Apple could be working on a device combining the iPod with a cell phone.

Even Steve Jobs dismissed these insane ideas as mere wishful thinking (in the same way he pooh-poohed the idea of watching video on a handheld device). I continued to hold out hope, thinking that I couldn’t possibly be the only person on the planet who wanted a phone combined with my iPod (I even occasionally dared dream that such a device might include e-mail and a web browser).

Then in 2006, the rumors of an iPhone began springing up all over the Internet. There were plenty of naysayers, claiming that such a device would be too bulky, complex, or expensive. Others said that, even if Apple did come up with such a device, it could never be called the iPhone, as that name was already taken.

 Finally, in January of 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Apple was getting into the smart phone business with a new product called, yes, the iPhone. If I recall correctly, it seems like Cisco immediately filed suit over Apple’s use of its trademark.

I didn’t care what they called it. I only knew that I wanted one. Now! The only problem, they weren’t yet available. So, I couldn’t make the impulsive $600 purchase just yet.

The next six months seem to crawl by as I read every bit of information I could find on the new iPhone. The more I read and the longer I thought about it, the more patient I became. I decided instead to get my feet wet with an iPod Touch, which I purchased right after it was released last summer.

While I was a bit envious of my friends, family, and associates when they whipped out their shiny new iPhone and dashed off a quick e-mail, I took some solace in the fact that not only did they pay a lot, they were also forced to use AT&T’s creaky old EDGE network. Plus, with every month that passed my Verizon termination fee declined by five dollars.

Fast-forward to the spring of 2008. The new iPhone is about to be released. With my birthday coming up in June, I dropped the occasional hint to my wife about the perfect gift. When she questioned my impulsiveness, I remind her that I did wait for one full year. After a steady stream of gentle badgering, she finally relented. However, I couldn’t be among the first in line on Friday, July 11, as that was the day we had to pick our daughter up from summer camp. Darn it! I guess she is a bit more important than a really cool piece of technology.

We arrived back in Florida on Saturday, July 12. That night, I went to Apple’s website and discovered that both of our local stores still had the new iPhone in stock. I planned to arrive at the mall early the next morning. As is often the case, I ran late.

When I arrived, I was thrilled to see that there wasn’t a line snaking out into the parking lot. Finding a parking place, I hopped out and briskly walked through the mall’s glass doors, along with a stream of others that I was sure were on the same mission. I sped up my pace and passed them as unobtrusively as possible. As I rounded the corner, there was the line.

From the store’s entrance, it wound down, back up, and then down again. Stepping through the only gap between polls, I joined the queue. Right behind me, those clutches of people I passed did the same.

After observing the line for a few minutes and try to get a rough count, it seemed to me to be a reasonable length. I figured it couldn’t take more then, say, a couple of hours. Boy, was I wrong!

After waiting patiently for about fifteen minutes (all the while listening to music from my iPod touch) a perky young woman came to my section of the line and informed us that we might not get an iPhone today. In the best case scenario, we might not get the phone of our choice (she said they had a lot more 8 GB units than there were 16 GB). She promised regular updates on the situation.

Back to the music for me. At first, the line moved rather briskly. We were making headway. I grew more excited. After about an hour of moving steadily forward, the line’s progress slowed to a stall. It occurred to me that we might have been moving forward so quickly because people were closing the gaps in the queue.

With every update from the pleasant Apple employee, my chances of getting a 16 GB iPhone looked better and better, even if the line was barely moving. However, my original wait time estimate was beginning to look massively optimistic.

By this time I had removed my earphones, and was beginning to bond with my neighbors in line. After all, we had a lot in common. We were all feeling a bit foolish for waiting so long for a piece of technology. We all shared a mutual admiration for the quality of the product we hope to buy. Plus, we had waited too long to go home empty-handed.

It was almost 5 PM on Sunday when I finally made it to the front of the line. From within the store, a young woman with a portable point of sale terminal walked out to greet me and escorted me into the store. I was shocked to discover that I knew her. She’d gone to high school with my children.

Cheerfully and very quickly, she entered all of my pertinent information in her little handheld terminal. I was transferring my Verizon number over to AT&T, and was concerned that the process might take a while. It didn’t! My account was approved, as was the porting of my number.

The moment I have been waiting for was here! She was actually going to the back of the store to grab one of those beautiful boxes that contain my long-awaited iPhone. After showing it to me (in the box), she started to put it into one of those new bags Apple had made for the occasion. Before slipping it all the way into the bag, she turned and asked, “Would you like me to activate it for you?” I responded affirmatively, as I wanted to start using it right away.

We walked over to one of the Mac books on display, plugged my iPhone in, and fired up in iTunes. There they were. Those colorful glowing icons against that slate black background. Gorgeous! Disconnecting it from the dock, I cradled the comfortably rounded surface in my hand, thanked her for her help, said my goodbyes to all of those I had met in line, and headed for home with my new toy.

Back in the mall, I turned the corner and was heading for the exit. Realizing that this new toy had all kinds of cool tools, including a camera, I reversed course, went back around the corner, and took my first iPhone picture. My long-suffering peers were still waiting for their opportunity to get their new iPhone (see the top of the page). I hoped they weren’t disappointed.

Long ago, in a world quite different from today’s, I actually lived without a computer in my life. Letters were either written in longhand, or pecked out with two fingers on on some clunky typewriter (I still have an old “daisy wheel” model in the garage. Graphic design was accomplished with a pen and ink, with the help of rub on letters and graphic elements (yes, I created many projects in with my technical pen and Letraset sheets).

The first personal computers fascinated me, but I could find little to do with them, other than play games. I did have a friend who could write some rudimentary BASIC and make my old TI 994a do some things that seemed amazing at the time, but apparently didn’t impress me enough to remember. I knew that there was something magical about these machines, I just couldn’t figure out how to make them do anything.

Desperate to utilize these machines hidden power, I even tried to learn BASIC myself. The structure of computer code cause me to suffer from the same type of anxiety I experienced when I tried to learn to type (with all my fingers — not just two). I now realize that this was part of my affliction. I experienced the same symtoms in my 9th grade Algebra class. So, I just kept playing games until I grew bored with them and sold the computer at a garage sale.

Yet, I still knew that there was something special about these highfalutin calculators. I just needed to find something they could do it was actually worth doing. Along the way I wasted a great deal of money (and it was a lot for a married twentysomething) on a string out worthless products from the Coleco Adam to the RadioShack TRS-80 model 100. I do remember visiting a couple computer stores and drooling over the Apple II. The price kept me from buying one.

The Coleco Adam was a hunk of junk (I think I got it because it came with a printer), while the TRS 80 was pretty cool. The only problem was the fact that, again, I couldn’t find anything useful to do with the machine (again, because I just couldn’t write any kind of code). Creating a database of my record albums seemed like such an utter waste of time.

Of course, I regularly ran into IBM PCs. These were mainly found in work environments, so I knew they tended to be more “serious” computers. Plus, the few times I was actually called upon to use them, I found all of the commands and special keystroke combinations a bit daunting for my “right-leaning” brain (to this day, a “PC” creates anxiety and elicits some sort of primeval “fight or flight” response, causing me to either curse the computer or run back to the safety of my Mac –  but, I’m getting ahead of myself).

It wasn’t until 1984 that I saw a hint of light at the end of my dark and dreary technology tunnel. It was called a MacIntosh. It was really expensive, at $2,000 (nothing like the $10,000 Apple had asked for the “Lisa” several years prior), but it was amazing technology. Still, it was tough to justify that kind of expense for a cool-looking word processor.

I wanted to be a true “early-adopter,” but decided to wait (as I have for most new Apple technologies since) until the memory was upgraded to 512k (that’s half a megabyte). Four times the memory for the same price seemed like too good a deal to pass up. So, I pulled out the old credit card and headed to my local Mac dealer in Colorado Springs to pick one up.

It was love at first sight! Not only was the machine beautiful, it was easy to setup and a breeze to operate, and totally intuitive. It still couldn’t do much, but I made the most of it. It wasn’t long before I was creating beautiful letters and proposals using my dot-matrix printer and storing files on those impressive 3.5″ plastic-cased floppies (much nicer than those flimsy 5.25′ paper covered IBM floppies). 

As the years passed, more programs appeared. There was even a audio recording program that I used to create radio features (far earlier than almost anyone in the industry where tape was king). What truly changed my life, though, was a desktop publishing program called “Ready, Set, Go” by Letraset (the same people who made those rub on letters and lines I used in my early graphic design work).

Now I could create page layouts on the screen and carry them to a printer on a floppy disk. This innovation changed one of my avocations into a true vocation. As I grew more skilled at page layout and my fame grew on the radio, I was ready to create my own investment newsletter (by this time I had moved up from a Mac 512k to a Mac Color to a MacIIcx – my third machine). With the help of AppleWorks (for graphics creation and databases), I started my newsletter in 1991 and it grew to more than 1,000 paid subscribers within a year. I eventually traded up to Pagemaker (then made by Aldus).

A year or two later and, I ventured into the world of portable computing with the Mac Portable. This behemoth weighed over 15 pounds, but it allowed me to write my newsletter while traveling. When I was unexpectedly released from my radio network, it saved the newsletter business, when I quickly relocated to Florida to get back on the air. While my wife sold the house, I was able to write and create newsletters on the Portable and FedEx the disks back to Colorado.

From that point, I lost track of the number of Macs I have owned. I am sure they have numbered in the dozens (heck, I am looking at four right now). Add to that a few Apple printers (including that wonderful Laserwriter), Apple’s failed digital camera, a few Newton’s, and many iPods, and I have, singlehandedly, kept Steve Jobs in mock turtlenecks and jeans. Given the fact that he (and his company) were instrumental in my success, I think we’re even.

I lean right.  And I’m not talking about politics (I’ll cover that on another blog). It’s my brain. The right side regularly beats up on it’s weaker sibling, the left brain. Thankfully, after many decades in denial, I realize what is wrong with me. I am, officially, left brain challenged. I fully admit to being part of “the rest of us.” I am also mathematically challenged (calculators were invented just for me), can’t write computer code, and don’t do Windows (it makes me crazy!!!!). That’s why I decided it was time to talk about my affliction and the technology that saved me (Thanks, Steve), allowing me to live the iLife!