Marinaccio: Let's begin with what you were covering in the early 1980s, how you got involved in the Apple launch, and what you covered since then
Richards: In the early 1980s I was one of maybe two or three reporters covering technology at the Mercury News. My beat was computers.
So Apple was one of the companies on my beat, and I had actually covered Apple earlier in my previous job at another paper, and I had written about their IPO, when they first went public. In about 1984, we started the Sunday computing section at the Mercury, and I was the first editor of it.
Marinaccio: Can you explain what the field of high-tech journalism was like then?
Richards: Well, it wasn't very high-profile. It was just like covering any other industry-- steel, or automobiles. Actually, it wasn't even as prominent as automobiles. It wasn't an industry that made the front pages, or had any household names in it. In the early 1980s, the New York Times didn't even have a technology reporter out here. I was a stringer for the Times here in 1981.
Marinaccio: Whereas today, that's very different.
Richards: Right.