I’ve always liked working with my hands. I spent my first fifteen years working in the family boatyard until I realized the place wasn’t big enough for my father and me. During that time I did just about every job it was possible to do in a boatyard: rigging, painting, carpentry, mechanics, you name it.

In 1978 I built my first real computer: a Sol-20 from a long-defunct company known as Processor Technology. It had a one MHz Intel 8080 processor (my current computer is 2,160 times faster than that). The Sol was an $1,800.00 kit that took about a month’s worth of evenings to assemble. Remarkably, when I finished it, it actually worked (even more remarkably, it still does, 29 years later).

A couple of years later the Apple II came on like a storm and I started working at an early Apple dealer in Westport, Connecticut, troubleshooting and repairing these neat little machines. I visited Apple in Cupertino for factory training; I think the company had a couple of hundred employees then.

Soon Apple reinvented the computer when it brought out the Macintosh. I bought one at its January 1984 introduction (the serial number was in the low two thousands), and have been a dedicated Mac user ever since.

I gravitated over to portable Macs when the company came out with what I’d call their first good laptop: the PowerBook 170. This excellent machine cost the princely sum of $4,600 in 1991. My current laptop—a MacBook Pro—is my fourth one. In between I had a 400 MHz G4 (tiBook) and a 1.25 gHz G4. (For reference’s sake, the MacBook Pro is about 86 times faster, has about 1,000 times more RAM, and cost less than half as much as that first 170.

Starting in 1985, I worked as a freelance writer and used whatever Mac I owned at the time for word processing. I had three books published, and wrote 198 monthly columns and 36 features for Sea Kayaker, Adirondack, and BOATING.

As an aside I should mention that my wife Maggie and I have three grown daughters and a fourteen-year-old son, Clay. Several years back, after the girls had moved on to college and beyond, we decided to formulate a learning adventure with Clay.

The “old pair” took a year’s leave of absence, rented out the house, bought a new pop-top VW camper, wrote up a home-schooling plan, and excused our ten-year-old son from school for the year.

Clay spent fifth grade on the road, visited over forty National Parks (and a lot of other weird stuff found along the way) and followed our country’s stories on the ground, so to speak. We camped all but two nights and drove 10,000 miles to get from Massachusetts to Death Valley (Clay’s favorite National Park, hands down). Along the way, we spent fewer than 100 of those miles on the I-anything.

A couple of years after we returned home, I was feeling isolated and restless in the writing life. I decided I wanted to change tacks. I missed working with my hands. I decided to study for my Apple certifications and got all three (Desktop Technician, Portable Technician, and OS X Help Desk Specialist). Certs in hand, I gained a bench job at an Apple Authorized Service Provider in my home state of Massachusetts.

Early last year, when I heard that Apple, Inc. was opening a store in Holyoke, Mass., I applied for a job as a Mac Genius. I was hired, and sent to the Mothership in Cupertino for training (my second trip remember; now the company had about 18,000 employees in North America).

I helped open that store last July and stayed on for five months providing tech support for customers at the Genius Bar and doing computer repairs in the Genius Room. Though I love the company, its products, and, most of all, its operating system, it didn’t take long for me to realize that working in a mall wasn’t my cup of tea.

Maggie and I had heard wonderful things about David Maffucci, the proprietor of Visionary Computer, so when I was looking for an alternative to working at the Genius Bar, Maggie urged me to give him a call.

I’m glad I did. I’ve been part of David’s team for a couple of months now, joining him and Robert to help you with your Macintosh computing needs. So there you have it. Now you know a bit about who Allen is.