Reese Jones discovered the Macintosh while doing graduate work in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate and grad student, he had worked with mainframe and minicomputers at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labs. "My academic work involved a lot of use of many different kinds of computers," he recalls. "I had quite a bit of experience hooking different kinds of computers together, and using them for different tasks; and making use of them in personal life as well."
This interest helped lead to his founding the Berkeley Macintosh User Group in 1984 a number of others. In 1986, his networking interests, and the invention of a system for connecting computers using simple phone lines, him to found Farallon, one of the most influential companies to produce Macintosh networking technology. He is now Chairman of Netopia, a company providing Internet DSL gateways, and Internet software services. Reese is also involved in a number of new ventures.
The interview was conducted on 22 May 2000 in Reese Jones' house in San Francisco. The interview was recorded into two Audio Interchange Format files, one much shorter than the other; the text of the two have been combined here.
A background hum in the original recording makes creating audio extracts impractical.
A copy of the original recording is held by Stanford University's Department of Special Collections.
In the interview Jones discusses experience with computing and networking prior to the introduction of the Macintosh, and the various intellectual or social interests that contributed to the founding and culture of BMUG. In addition to having been a membership in DEC, Unix, and other user groups, Jones discusses his work as a reviewer for The Absolute Sound, a quarterly whose informal, qualitative style set it apart from other audiophile magazines, and provided a model for the BMUG Newsletter's literary style.