On social media, it is common for people to post old pictures of themselves on Thursdays. This practice is known as “Throwback Thursday.” While I’m not much for posting old pictures of myself, I thought it might be fun to start recounting some “throwback” moments from my nearly two decades with Accordance. I’ll start with my first exposure to Accordance way back in January of 1992.
I was in my first semester of seminary then, and had recently told a friend in my Hebrew class that I was looking to buy a computer. Little did I know that he was a Mac guy and that I had unwittingly become his evangelistic prospect!
At some point in his campaign to convince me that I should buy a Mac, my friend invited me to come to a “Brown Bag Lunch” after class to see a local programmer who was developing a new Bible software program for Macs. The seminary sometimes hosted guest speakers during the lunch hour, and you were expected to bring your own lunch. I hadn’t brought a lunch that day and hadn’t planned on staying, but I went along anyway.
I remember standing at the back of a room full of guys, doing my best to see what was being demonstrated on the computer monitor that had been set up. Looking back I marvel that I could even see what was happening, but I suppose I had younger eyes back then!
This was about two years before Accordance 1.0 was released, so this must have been a very early prototype. Nevertheless, I remember seeing this programmer demonstrate how you could perform grammatical searches of the Greek New Testament using a very Mac-like drag-and-drop interface. It was extremely cool, and I remember thinking, “This is what I want to be able to do with a computer!”
My friend, meanwhile, was seated at the front of the room enthusiastically asking intelligent questions and volunteering to beta-test. He went on to write the very first manual for Accordance.
As for me, that demo convinced me to buy my first Mac—a decision I never regretted. Still, I had to wait two long years before I could purchase Accordance. I guess I should have asked to be a beta-tester when my friend did, but at that point I didn’t even know what a beta-tester was.
In the end, my thought that “this is what I want to be able to do with a computer” turned out to be quite prophetic. I’ve spent the last twenty years using Accordance to study the Bible, and I’ve never stopped being amazed at what it enables me to do. I guess you could say that was one life-changing software demo!