"I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school"
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Hertzfeld’s line has the casual shrug of someone confessing a minor distraction, but it’s really a quiet origin story for an entire cultural pivot: the moment “school” stopped being the primary gatekeeper of serious knowledge. The telling word is “suddenly.” It suggests not a gradual disenchantment with academia, but an abrupt reordering of attention once a personal computer moved from abstraction to object-to-be-lived-with. The Apple II wasn’t just a tool; it was a new kind of environment, one that rewarded curiosity immediately, without syllabi, permission, or institutional tempo.
The subtext is a polite indictment of the university’s pace and incentives. Graduate school offers status, credentials, and long horizons; a home computer offers feedback loops. You type, it responds. You fail, you iterate. That immediacy can feel like truth. “Interesting” here isn’t mere entertainment; it’s the thrill of agency, of building things that work today rather than arguments that might matter later. It also hints at a particular Bay Area alchemy: Berkeley’s intellectual prestige sitting next to a burgeoning hacker ethic that treated hardware as an invitation, not a black box.
Context matters. In the late 1970s, buying an Apple II was less like picking up a laptop and more like opting into a nascent worldview: computing as personal, playful, and experimental. Hertzfeld’s offhand admission captures the seduction of that shift. The personal computer didn’t just compete with school; it made a different school, one with no tuition and infinite electives.
The subtext is a polite indictment of the university’s pace and incentives. Graduate school offers status, credentials, and long horizons; a home computer offers feedback loops. You type, it responds. You fail, you iterate. That immediacy can feel like truth. “Interesting” here isn’t mere entertainment; it’s the thrill of agency, of building things that work today rather than arguments that might matter later. It also hints at a particular Bay Area alchemy: Berkeley’s intellectual prestige sitting next to a burgeoning hacker ethic that treated hardware as an invitation, not a black box.
Context matters. In the late 1970s, buying an Apple II was less like picking up a laptop and more like opting into a nascent worldview: computing as personal, playful, and experimental. Hertzfeld’s offhand admission captures the seduction of that shift. The personal computer didn’t just compete with school; it made a different school, one with no tuition and infinite electives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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