I first heard Cary speak on "The future of Macintosh and Desktop Computing" at my first User Group meeting (A.P.P.L.E. Coop in Renton) in 1987. I knew nothing about desktop computing, but I knew that Macintosh was headed in the right direction. A few weeks before this I had reviewed and selected what I considered to be the best of the general Macintosh book (The Apple Macintosh Book 2nd Edition). Cary was its author. I still have on my bookshelf that book and two successive editions. I stopped in at the Coop to see what a User Group was all about and the woman said that the Mac SIG was meeting tonight and that Cary Lu was speaking. Since I recognized his name as a Macintosh authority I made sure to get back there that evening. The standing room only crowd was spellbound as Cary told of his recent visit to Macworld Expo in Boston, his predictions for hardware of the future (disk storage in the gigabytes and RAM chips in triple digits!), and a remarkable description of his home office including the concrete wall behind which he stationed any noise producing hardware such as fan cooled Macs, hard drives, etc. He insisted on absolute quiet in his workspace and " the wall " was his solution. He also counseled that adopting a career of writing about technology was not the way to get rich! Cary's confident, authoritative and entertaining delivery was a joy to experience and I tried to read and hear him whenever possible.
I did adopt Macintosh as my personal computer of choice and eventually made a mid life career change. I've been working with Apple Macintosh technology in various capacities for the past 7 years and I count Cary among the handful of mentors who inspired me to make this change. I know that many others also have Cary to thank for making their world a truly better place.