About

In the beginning, Steve Jobs created Apple ….

After spending a peaceful 2011 Christmas holiday reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and reflecting on how this has all impacted many people’s lives, including my own, I decided to publish again. This time, online.

Like you …. I have formulated ideas and an outlook on life through my upbringing and experiences. That is how we develop as individuals. The more we read, the more we interact with others, the more we travel and the more we practice intuitive behavior without regard to what others might think enhance are development as human beings.

I have come to understand that life is not a dress rehearsal. Nicht wahr?

While living on the beach in Santa Monica in 1986 and working in Century City, I had accumulated in excess of 4,000 business cards from prospective clients engaged in offering inancial services and products. As vice president for an investment company in the Southwestern region, my task was to stay in contact with those folks and encourage them to offer my product line to their customers. That is how I received compensation. Today, that sounds simple.

Back then, how did one organize 4000 business cards for individuals by firm, city and/or interest?

Thank you, Mitch Glaser

There was in our apartment building a fellow by the name of Mitchell Glaser who worked with IBM computers. The computers were the size of a room, difficult for the under 40 generation to comprehend today. While I did own a clunky GTE mobile phone at the time along with 180,000 other users, there were no ‘smartphones,’ no desktop computers which amounted to much and of course … no internet. How did the world survive?

One Saturday morning, I asked Glaser if there was a computer which could help me develop a system to organize the information on the business cards by name, firm, city and/or interest and which would enable to send personalized letters, call and visit. He indicated that a local retail store had a product made by a company called Apple and we should go and visit.

That afternoon, I walked out with a Mac Plus, the first of nine Macintosh products that I have purchased since then. If my memory serves me correct, that fall I attended a seminar in Studio City where a fellow introduced important software for the Mac Plus which would enable people like me to develop databases and allow me to print personalized letters to those 4000 clients. The programs were called Works and Word, the company was Microsoft and the young man was …. Bill Gates.

Glaser kept the Mac Plus in his apartment during the week as I was constantly on the road and on the weekends he showed me how to maximize the potential of this new device. After I installed the Microsoft software, he told me I was writing programs in an hour an a half and similar projects had taken him a month to do on the mainframe IBMs.

Where this is all leading

In 1989, my wife and I moved to New Mexico. The living was easy, taxes were low and the City of Santa Fe for its size at that time (60,000) had and still has an incredible concentration of art galleries and artists, restaurants and an architectural and cultural identity which sets it apart from the rest of America.

Gravitating to a small agricultural community along the Chama River in 1990, my wife and I purchased an abandoned farmhouse. It was built in the jacal style with walls 26 inches thick. Over the years we added on a few thousand square feet with modern day pressed adobe block, 14” x 10” and 3. inches utilizing mud mortar in between the adobes.

For the past two decades we have had a wonderful symbiotic relationship with the land and animals which have invited us into their lives. A flock of sheep, including the biblical, spotted, four horned Jacob as well as a bevy dogs and cats. My wife’s an artist, I’m still involved in the world of finance and we both enjoy living and working beyond the sidewalks and can’t imagine ever leaving our farm.

In 1994, with no funding and little knowledge of the creative people were who resided in our community, we founded the Abiquiú Studio Tour and promoted it by publishing The Abiquiú Post. The 12 page tabloid was created on the Mac Plus we purchased back in ’86 using Pagemaker and was distributed throughout Northern New Mexico. The publication was so well received, we continued to publish it on a quarterly basis on upgraded Macs until the end of 1997.

With the exception of one print version which came out in the fall of 1997, The Abiquiú Post has been silent … this is, until today.

We’ll be sharing our experiences and observations with you on civic affairs, economics, food, health, retirement, rural living and technology. If you have an idea for an article regarding one of these topics, please feel free to drop us a note or email for possible inclusion in the future. Remember, with the World Wide Web, we are all part and linked to the same community.

May you enjoy a healthy and prosperous 2012 and have a bountiful harvest in the garden of the mind ….The Abiquiú Post.

Warmest regards,

Richard Bock

January 13th, 2012