As I pulled up to the long, curved driveway, I thought about the irony of the date. Hindsight, they say, is 20/20, and I was to do my interview with Steve Jobs on December 20, 2020.

It was July, 1999 and I had just attended my first Macworld New York as a speaker along with Duane Straub from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And I was a newbie gawker. Here’s the report I wrote back then — with my first reactions to Manhattan as a Colorado kid.

It was 1998, and our Macs were getting fairly powerful. The PowerMac 8500 on my desk had about the same power as my Silicon Graphics “Indy” UNIX workstation at work. Meanwhile, I had long since migrated away from modems to ISDN, and the speed at which the Mac could spill its guts to a stranger in Brazil was becoming alarming. Here’s how I described the situation in my column: Utopia Planitia.

Apple was in the process of 1) crushing a 16 year old Canadian boy and his family over a Domain Name dispute, 2) hiding code in a recommended G3 ROM update that took control of the Mac away from the customer. Here’s how I called it at Macopinion.com in October, 1999.