I started showing our high school photography teacher what the class could do once they scanned their negatives, and soon enough I was teaching photoshop in photography classes during my study halls. At the time the school did not have photoshop for Windows, and I seem to recall they could not get the scanners to work with Windows either, so we never used PCs for photography class.

Our assistant superintendent was a big Apple fan, and we got in the Power Macintosh 6100's! 33 Mhz! Netscape 1.0N, that was the first time I had used a browser other then NCSA Mozaic. Photoshop was so much faster on the PowerPC chip, so much better then the 680x0 chip. I started to get into web sites and HTML. This was the time I decided I wanted to go to college for computer art, and mainly web related computer art.

My mom never got me a Mac, but my dad always had an abundance of them. He had the Workgroup Server home once I remember, and used it at school. I am pretty sure that thing ran Apple AUX. I started reading this book "I Hate UNIX" to learn how to use the Workgroup Server.

UNIX was really hard for a kid who did not grow up using DOS. But at this point I had experience using things such as telnet and gopher, pine, etc, so learning the commands wasn't that hard. The thing that was really challenging was learning about TCP/IP, which is a lot different then AppleTalk.

By my senior year of high school I was really into this HTML thing, and had a lot of experience with Photoshop, so I started to help out with web site design for the school, as well as within the community.

When I graduated high school I got my first Mac. A Performa 6400/200. MacAddict called it "the sexiest Mac ever" They were still beige at this time, but this thing did have curves (hense the 'sexy' remark).

Through college I doubled the L2 cache on that thing and maxed the RAM in it, that computer served me very well. I did a lot of HTML and Photoshop learnin' on that machine.

In high school I worked on the yearbook, so had a lot of experience and Aldus/Adobe PageMaker. So I volunteered to do graphics and layout on the yearbook my freshman year in college. This was my induction into Student Publications at BGSU, and I was soon heading up a web staff and putting The BG News online for the first time by freshman year.

At the time we had a Windows NT 3.5 file server I had to deal with, and this was really my first experience with Windows. Friends tell me it was better then starting with Windows 95. In 1997 The BG News used a system called Intrepid, advertising used the same thing (they were 386 boxes running DOS). Production was using Macs though, just like the yearbook. In 1998 The News got Macs, and a couple years later we even moved advertising to Mac. We eventually got rid of the Windows NT file server and ran Rhapsody, and now OS X Server for our file and print server.