ieletapana
Ka kawau ieletapana poiu kapolo.
“The apple has fallen from the tree.”
Notes: Yesterday the world lost Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple—really the main driving force behind the company since its inception. It’s always sad when anyone dies, but Apple’s had a profound influence on my life, so it gave me pause, his passing.
You see, I’ve never really used anything but Apple computers. The very first ones I had regular access to were the Apple IIe’s my mother was able to bring home from school during the summer when I was very young. I used to play MECC educational games on them, like Number Muncher and Oregon Trail.
Later, my best friend got a brand new computer (in color!), that had a new 3.5 inch floppy disk drive in addition to the 5.25 inch one: An Apple IIgs. This was the pinnacle of computing power and entertainment at the time. He had a bevy of games (too many to list), and we played through just about every title Sierra had made in the late 80s and early 90s. In addition, since this was the best computer anyone we knew had at the time, I used it to compose my first ever word-processed story: A 40 page short Oz story for a project I had in fifth grade.
When I was in junior high, my mother was able to bring home our first Macintosh (I believe a Macintosh Classic II). This was where I first the encountered Carmen Sandiego series.
Some time in high school, when we graduated to a machine that ran System 7, I had my introduction to the internet via America Online. Back then, my friends and I would race home and get on AOL so we could chat with each other via instant messages, despite the fact we lived within walking distance of each other’s houses.
And it was some time during OS 8 that I began writing seriously. I first started taking my old short stories (written in pencil on lined paper) and transferring them to ClarisWorks documents. At the end of high school I wrote my first novel, all on ClarisWorks. I wrote a bit of it on our machine at home and also on the school’s computers (since, of course, my school only had Apple machines). Around the same time, I began my second novel, which I finished on one of the best presents I’d ever received up to that point: My own tangerine iMac G3. It was the second generation, and had bugs, but it, in fact, still works—and though I don’t use it now, I actually did use it in my office when I went to graduate school. And it served me well.
The G3 saw me through my entire undergraduate career. Everything I wrote was written on AppleWorks (the successor to ClarisWorks)—including the documents I made to document my languages when I started to conlang in 2000. All of them started out life as AppleWorks documents, and those documents are still in existence today (and are what I still use), though they’ve now been updated to Pages documents (Pages is the modern successor to AppleWorks).
When I graduated from Berkeley, my parents got me a Snowball iMac, which was even better than the G3 (which is why it stayed home and the G3 went to my office at school). And when the backlight went out on the Snowball, rather than replace it (only costs $50, but it was about time), I got the Intel-based iMac I currently use today.
Along the way, I’ve also had a MacBook Pro (still serving its purpose today), an iPod (which served me well on many a drive between San Diego and Orange County), an iPhone (possibly one of the handiest gadgets I’ve ever had), and the software I use reliably to do everything that I do: writing, web work, conlanging, music, graphics, fonts, presentations, e-mail—everything.
In short, all of my professional accomplishments have been achieved through the aid of an Apple product. That’s not insignificant. For someone who always felt in the dark when it came to working with DOS-based machines, Apple has helped me to be productive and to do what I do better.
I know it’s fashionable now to be down on Apple because their products are popular and their relatively easy learning curve invites users who are, otherwise, technologically incompetent, but for someone who’s been with Apple for quite awhile, things just seem to keep getting better. And though Steve Jobs is gone, I’m sure things will continue to get better, because he laid the foundation, and showed us how to keep on building.
Anyway, if you read this far, thanks for sharing my little trip down memory lane. Today’s word comes from Zhyler. In Zhyler, it’s yeldaban (in the orthography, yeldaban). When it came to Kamakawi, the initial glide broke (as all initial glides do in Kamakawi), giving us ieletapana. The Zhyler root yelda is, I believe, the word for “red”.
