My first exposure to an Apple Computer was the 2E that they got for my high school's math department. I was a junior, and I'd had a computer at home for probably like two years, a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K memory. Yes, 4K. 8K was very expensive. The 2E at school had, as I recall 16. Maybe 32.
In college, our computer center was an early adopter of Apples, putting Macintoshes (I called them Macintie at the time) into all three of its computer centers, and selling them through the school store. I didn't get one; the cost of school was high enough before a several thousand dollar toy. I used those computers to write pretty much all my term papers, and more abitiously, used them to tabulate the votes of hundreds of students to select the films for the Student Film Society.
These days, I'd put the whole vote process online.
I wouldn't write about the passing of Steve Jobs except that, more than most any public figure, he probably most literally changed the life I'd known, and yours, too. Apple changed how we thought about computing, what computers could do, how we advertise computers, and how "computer geek" came to take over and define so much of our pop culture.
I think he may be the business leader I'd most admired in my lifetime. The idea of "Silicon Valley", of a magical, mythical place where really smart, creative people got to work in sleek employment utopias... Apple was the first (Google, now, has probably eclipsed that). I was fascinated, when I finally went to Sn Francisco and Oakland to visit my sister (she was doing grad work at Berkeley), to see Palo Alto up close. They make Apples there!
Outside of a brief foray into a Wintel tower, my computers have been Apples. My preference is for Apple. I have worked on two MacBooks for the life of this blog. I have carried my music on two iPods. I used to love the Creative Departments of the ad agencies where I worked, because that was the Apple playground. And it just reinforced how cool it was to be "a creative."
To me, that's the heart of Apple, the legacy of Steve Jobs - not the technology, but the faith that technology, put to good use, can help us, inspire us, make us more creative, better. These latter years, when Jobs became a better CEO, putting himself out there for his company's dynamic product presentations... the passion and the joy he exuded, doing what he loved to do... was hard not to find inspiring.
At my table, as I write this, loving my aging Mac Book, I have to acknowledge that much of what is good in my life, right now, is because of Steve Jobs. I don't think I can say that about another public figure, not in the same way, not sending out from the laptop he helped create... for me. That strikes me as awesome... and sad. So very sad. May he rest in peace.
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