Yesterday was a very sad day for me and for a lot of you as well. I never met Steve, although he's one of a handful of people that I would have liked to have spent some time with. I'm just a little older than he and I grew up watching the likes of him and Woz and Bill Gates, among others, turn the world upside down. Too many of you can not appreciate a time when there were no personal computers or cell phones or MP3 players. My kids just go to their computers like I went to my radio or B&W TV; it was just a fixture in the home. But the computer was a mystery box. I remember my first one, a Commodore VIC 20. I remember sitting down with some books and learning why and how and what this thing was. I remember creating small programs in a memory space so small it's a wonder that anything ran.
People like Steve were on the cutting edge of that time and saw the future and worked hard to bring about their dreams. And whether you're a Mac or a PC or whether you love or hate Apple, there's no denying that Steve Jobs was a visionary and a genius. One of the first systems that I worked on in my job was an Apple IIE. I learned to program it in Apple Basic and did some great things on that computer. I watched as the Macintosh was introduced wondering how it would make it with the "limitations" that Apple built in. But they really weren't limitations; it turned out that Steve just saw things better than the rest of us did.
I always kind of wanted a Mac to learn on and play with. But I could never afford it or justify it in my work or personal environment. Then a few years ago, a friend gave me an old iMac. I spent a week with that computer and one day looked at my wife and told her that if I never ever used a Windows machine again it would be too soon. It just makes sense from an IT guy perspective as well as a personal one. I'm the kind of person that Steve would have liked, at least from a business perspective. I am a true convert, as this blog name alludes to. I now live in an Apple environment with my iPhone and iPad and my kids have iPods and I have two iMacs at home and a Mac Pro at work. I still have to run windows, but I do that on top of my Mac. I will never go back. And I push the Apple message whenever anyone asks me; and sometimes when they don't :)
Steve saw the usefulness of the Graphical User interface when we were all happy with DOS. He saw the usefulness of the 3.5" floppy and then it's end of life. He saw SCSI and firewire when no one else really did. He saw what a music player could be and how to create a really good smartphone. And most recently he's seen the ending of life of the optical disk. Yeah sometimes I did question and still do I guess. But the other day I was installing something on my kids' PC and the DVD drive wouldn't open. I was concerned because it's a really nice drive and I hoped he hadn't broken it. Turns out that the issue was that it hardly ever gets used; so perhaps Steve is right...again.
I'll miss Steve, even though we never met nor have I ever seen him in person at an event. I'll miss that insightful enthusiasm that he brings to the table every time you see him. I hope and pray that Apple has enough of his DNA in it's soul to continue to innovate and push the envelope into the future when so many other companies are prepared to follow or play catch up.
This is his last "One more thing"
God bless you Steve
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