Blog
Some Words on the Passing of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was the driving force behind Apple Computers, Next Computers, Pixar Entertainment, and more (Photo: Dave Dunfield, Dave's Old Computers)
How did Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) impact my life's path?
When I was a kid, our local library had a computer that patrons could sign up to use for an hour at a time. For a while, it didn't even have a disk drive. Users would feverishly type in several pages worth of program code from magazines and try to get them to run properly before their hour was up. The schedule was usually pretty booked, and generally by the same people, day after day, over and over. At 9 years old, I became one of those people, and it was my first wonderful exposure to Apple.
Several months later, my parents surprised us for Christmas with the most expensive gift they had ever purchased: a 48K Apple ][+ personal computer. It is important to note that Dad purchased a bunch of video games with it, which made the Apple what people would call today "the Atari killer" for me and my siblings. But like many things in a child's mind, the splendor and novelty of those games wore off after only a few months, and the fun factor (and maybe even the very worth) of the Apple was in question.
The solution was quite obvious to me: our parents would have to buy some new computer games for us ASAP. My dad had a different fix to my dilemma. He simply smiled, handed me a copy of the "Applesoft ][ Basic Programmers' Reference Manual," and told me, "Son, this is a computer. You can make your own games with it. Give it a shot."
That was when I had the epiphany: it wasn't that the quality of games had improved, but that the game itself had changed. At the ripe young age of ten, I had realized that Apple was "the Atari killer" because of the creative power that it granted its users, and that the sky was now the limit.
In the days since I started learning how to make computers do precisely what I wanted them to do, I have seen previously unfathomable advances in computing technology and application. Back then the exclusive minority of computer users were a miniscule fraction of the population. The present population holds an overwhelming majority of people who can't imagine regular everyday life without computers. In fact it's not really about "computers" any more as much as computing devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, cameras, media centers, music players, and so much more. The number of things that we've digitized for convenience, storage and efficiency's sake is boundless, and we get something new daily.
So again... how did Steve Jobs impact my life's path?
The same way he did for everyone else: through an innovative life built around empowering people to create, to improve, and to dream. Most of those aforementioned advances in technology were the result of projects he was involved in directly, and many are still in play today. His philosophy yielded success not only for himself, but for countless others who saw that better tools yielded better results, that emphasis on quality was not necessarily an obstacle to profit, or that questioning the status quo was a starting step in making things better. That philosophy of innovation is his legacy, and I'd like to think that we are all a little better for it.
You will be missed, and thanks for helping us all to make the most of our creativity, and to "think different."
Posted on 10/07/2011 (2:23 PM) by Adams
