Monte

Our first family computer was a Macintosh Performa 405 which my father bought for Christmas in ‘93. My life changed as soon as we tore the wrapping from the box which, at the time, was almost as big as me. It was a sweet machine: 16 MHz Motorola processor with .25 k L1 cache, 4 MB of RAM, 256 k of graphics memory, 80 MB hard drive, 1.44 MB floppy drive, and a 13-inch color display running System 7.0.1 (the Macintosh operating system). A sweet machine indeed.

Actually, my first experience with computers was the Commodore 64, but a command prompt isn’t of much interest to a 6-year-old. The Macintosh was the first time I had ever seen a graphical user interface, used a mouse, and used more than just the arrow keys on a keyboard (I have a fond recollection of my mother teaching me how to put spaces between words using the spacebar and how to capitalize letters using the shift key).

That computer really did change my life. From the moment we opened the box that Christmas morning, I was hooked. I’d spend hours upon hours in front of that tiny, 16-color CRT clicking and exploring (and breaking). Even when I wasn’t in front of the computer, it was always on my mind. Many times in elementary school, whenever I’d become bored with multiplication lessons or a reading assignment, I’d secretly doodle little drawings of computers on scratch paper. I’d draw the monitor and tower equipped with floppy drive and CD-ROM drive; I’d even draw the mouse and keyboard with all of its keys.

When I wasn’t drawing computers, I was drawing mockups of applications, icons, and entire screenshots. I swear, if I had known at the time who Susan Kare was, she would have been my childhood hero.

Still today, I love mocking up applications in Photoshop. Sometimes I pretend that I’ve been tasked with designing the next version of Windows, and I’ll spend hours creating icons, windows, menus, scroll bars, toolbars, and other graphical widgets—literally, hours! But my interest goes beyond cosmetics. I like rethinking how people interact with software, and I like questioning traditional GUI conventions.

It’s embarrassing to admit all of this. Most people would probably not understand.

I had never acknowledged my interest in GUI design as anything but a bizarre hobby until recently. A friend and fellow classmate and I were discussing what we’d be doing after graduation, and I told him I was thinking about getting a masters degree in Computer Information Systems Management, to which he bluntly responded, “That’s trash.” I laughed. I wasn’t at all offended because I knew he was right. The last thing I want to be doing ten years from now is sitting in an office planning a corporate network and administering databases, but at the time, CISM seemed to be the only thing remotely applicable to my career. So then he told me about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Basically it’s the study of how humans interact with computers and technology and encompasses computer science, behavioral sciences, and design.

And that’s when it clicked. Maybe this passion of mine can be more than just a bizarre hobby.