20 Years

Twenty years ago this month, Clients & Profits became real.

That's not quite true. It wasn't real in the sense that it existed and could be sold, because it didn't and it couldn't. That wouldn't happen much later than I thought. By real I mean that someone offered to pay money for the promise of Clients & Profits, and that was a big deal. Big enough to quit my day job, max out the credit cards, and move to Pacific Beach.

All this had started two years earlier, in 1984. I was a junior at San Diego State University. I'd started out as a Film major but switched to English because I wanted to be a copywriter. Lisa and I wanted to work in marketing and were eager to start a business -- any business.

My epiphany came one day in the SDSU student store: the day they first displayed the first Macintosh.

I can remember it like it was yesterday, and can honestly say it changed my life. The Macintosh had just shipped and Apple was anxious to sell to the education market, which was in a large part responsible for its success with the Apple II. So the student store hooked up a working Mac 128k and an ImageWriter printer on a counter and let anyone who walked by give it a try.

It has to be hard for anyone under 30 to appreciate what a computer-less world of the early 1980s. My high school's computer lab consisted of a janitor's broom closet. In the corner the school installed a typewriter-like terminal that connected to the school district's minicomputer. There was no computer display. When you typed on the keyboard, the letters printed out of the printer. You could write little programs (like a drawing of Snoopy created solely with letters and numbers; that was pretty impressive at the time). If your father was an engineer or had a business, your family might have an Apple II or a Commodore VIC 20 or a Radio Shack TRS-80.

I don't remember anyone in my high school class of 1981 using a home computer for school work. But I do remember spending l-o-n-g hours typing typing typing on my mom's IBM Selectric to write papers. And I remember lots of white-out.

Seeing the Macintosh in person for the first time was transcendent. I remember waiting in line for my turn, then trying MacWrite and MacPaint. Fonts! You could actually choosing different fonts when you typed! And when you printed from MacPaint, what appeared on the paper looked JUST LIKE what you drew! When I was using the Macintosh, time seemed to stop.

I spent way too many hours at the store playing with MacWrite and MacPaint (which was just about all the Mac could run at time), and all it did was make me crazy. At the time I worked part-time at a department store selling televisions and then-new VCRs. I think I made something like $3.75/hour. The Macintosh cost $2,495 -- without the printer! It cost more than tuition and books. It was tempting, and after that moment the Macintosh was all I could think about.

I got my first Macintosh only a couple of years later when Lisa and I started the business. At the time I would have considered the business a success if I could buy a brand-new Macintosh every year.

I've owned countless Macs since 1984. The 512k Mac. A Mac SE/30. The Macintosh Portable. And on and on. I kept them all, too. They're all frozen in time on the last day I used them before their retirement for a newer model, like little Clients & Profits time capsules.



Speaking of time capsules, reaching the twentieth anniversary this year has me wallowing deeply in company nostalgia.

I recently organized all of the company's vintage Macs for a mini-museum at the office, which I'm calling the Clients & Profits Archives. I've also been rummaging through old C&P manuals, marketing materials, and design sketches to show visitors how Clients & Profits developed over the last two decades. Together they tell the Clients & Profits story. But it's more than a story about one software company. It's a story about how the advertising and design changed because of a single innovation: the Macintosh.

I've been boring my employees with these stories for years. And now it's time to bore you.