The Member of the Month for September is Mark Bazrod. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Mark better during our last Macworld 2002 participation. He and his wife Sally are important contributors to MLMUG and jumped at the opportunity to volunteer to help at our booth. It was their first year attending a Macworld Conference and I was impressed with their unselfish contribution. I don't remember them missing a MLMUG meeting and I look forward to seeing their smiles every month. Mark's experience with computers is pretty impressive. Mark, you are truly "one of the earliest and latest users of Macintoshes in MLMUG." Thank you for sharing.

— Maria O. Arguello

 

Mark Bazrod

I am probably simultaneously one of the earliest and latest users of Macintoshes in MLMUG, a position not easy to attain. In fact, I may be one of the oldest users of computers. When I graduated from the Wharton School in 1956 one of my accounting professors suggested I take a look at computing. So I took two computer science graduate courses at night at Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Of about 150 people in the classes I was the only one with a business school background and we learned to program in binary, all 0s and 1s. That certainly was the Stone Age.

I purchased my first computer in 1978, a Radio Shack TRS80, and within a few months moved up to an Apple II. It had a giant amount of memory for that time — 64K. A bit of a digression — I got involved in leasing computer mainframes back in 1968 and the first deal we did was for three IBM 360 Model 90's leased to Eastern Airlines at cost a total of about $9 million. And each only had about 64k of memory! I had the unusual experience of being driven from Eastern's data processing center to the Miami airport terminal on a support road next to the runway so as we drove along, 707's were taking off right beside us.

In the early 80s I moved up to a Macintosh, used it for a number of years until the transition between a PC in the office and the Macintosh at home became too cumbersome. I then started using Window's based portables.

After my wife, Sally, got an iBook in 2000, I started to come to the MLMUG meetings with her, coming to grips with the different terminology. When the iMac came out last winter we bought one. The reasons were primarily because it was so cool and elegant and much more powerful than the iBook (and that was even before we had the greatest operating system, OS X).

So if you look at my history of using computers, you start to get something like the history of computer usage over the last 45 years. Is that an enviable analogy?

I am a graduate of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, got my CPA the following year and placed second in the nation. While I was working as an accountant at Peat Marwick Mitchell during the day, I went to Temple Law School at night (truly insanity) but graduated first in the class. I practiced law at Wolf, Block Schorr & Solis-Cohen for 5 years and then left, getting involved in mainframe computer leasing.

I became much more involved in leasing computers around 1971 when I started arranging leasing for computer peripheral manufacturers. One of the first products was a standalone word processor which cost around $20,000. That was in 1972 and gives you some indication of how costs have fallen in the computer industry. On a trip to London in 1974 to speak to some brokers for Lloyds of London which was issuing a unique policy, I was a passenger in a car which passed a fire engine because the driver thought it was going too slow! Several years later there were major problems in the computer industry and all the policies were cancelled, except ours. I went to London for a meeting which I thought would be with a few people and ended up speaking with all 30 or so members of the Governing Board of Lloyds. That was highly unusual since mere mortals rarely get to speak to that Board. Later one of our computer manufacturers went bankrupt and part of the discussions among the lenders and leasing companies was the subject of the Boston public radio station program and so I ended up on TV (but only for about 5 minutes).

In 1991 I decided that it didn't make any sense to keep taking risk in computer residuals and so our company, then renamed LPI Software Funding Group, Inc., switched over to focusing on financing computer software. I've concentrated on software leasing for the last 10 years. If you're interested in our business, please see our Web site, www.lpilease.com

I have been very active in the Equipment Leasing Association, the trade association for the leasing industry, having been on the Board of Directors of the Association and on the Board of Directors for the Leasing Foundation for 9 years. I was chairman of a number of the committees over the years and spoke at industry conferences on many occasions, first back in 1972. That was sort of scary because, speaking to more than 250 people for the first time, I criticized industry lawyers as being too verbose and failing to use plain English. Not surprisingly, a number of lawyers didn't like the talk.

On a personal side, most of that is in the April issue of the MLMUG Journal when my wife, Sally, was highlighted as Member of the Month. (It costs a lot of money to pay off Maria.)

As far as my use of the iMac, I found the switch from Windows to the iMac relatively easy � the basic computer architecture is the same in all systems, it's infinitely easier to make the switch from Windows to OS X than OS 9.2, the preemptive multitasking system takes care of a lot of problems, a lot of the arcane terminology of OS 9.2 has been replaced, and OS X has been rock solid. By the time this issue appears I suspect that Sally and I will have switched over to Jaguar. The most unusual aspect of the iMac to me has been the extensive use of keyboard shortcuts rather than a mouse. I'm now using more shortcuts (even on the Windows machine), but my impression is that you have to use the computer a significant amount of time before numerous shortcuts become ingrained.

I started using FilePro to build a database of much of the information in the list messages and extracts of some articles from various Web sites relating to the Mac. I hope to have that available for anyone to use within another 6 months. I also started to use IBM's VivaVoice. So far, it's been easy to use and very effective and efficient. I recommend it to anyone who is not a rapid typist. It's not a total substitute for keyboarding, but it saves a tremendous amount of time for someone with my typing skills.

So I look forward to enjoying the people and discussions at the MLMUG meetings and expanding my use of the iMac — on to iMovie!

— Mark Bazrod