Steve Jobs
I did not expect that I would feel such a sense of loss when Steve Jobs died. But I do.
I was not always an Apple guy, of course. I grew up in a fairly poor lower middle class blue collar family, and money was tight. Sure, those Apple ][s looked real pretty, but $1200 in 1983 might as well have been ten million dollars, so I knew I wasn't going to get my hands on one. In 1984 I finally convinced my parents that I really needed a computer (a blatant lie, but I'm glad they didn't call my bluff). We ended up bringing home a Commodore 64, for the outrageously bargain-basement price of $299. Of course I fell in love with it, and it shaped my childhood in many ways. I learned to program. I learned how computers work. And I got my first lesson in tech tribalism, hating on those Apple and Atari and Tandy users. Those poor suckers! They didn't even have sprites!
I grew up. Over the intervening years I had an Amiga and a PC clone. And then I went to Cornell, a school totally immersed in the Macintosh. You could not take a CS course at Cornell unless you had a Macintosh or you enjoyed spending lots of hours in the Mac labs. I quickly grew to covet my friends' Macs. Such speed! Such graphics! In many ways much more fun than my 486 running ultra-primitive, pre-1.0 Linux. But... such exorbitant expense! Paying for Cornell and buying a Macintosh was out of the question. No way. So I waited.
Years later I was working in Silicon Valley and Apple was on the brink of extinction. Just as it seemed that BeOS was going to score a major victory, everything changed. Steve Jobs came back. I was a little incredulous, sure, but also hopeful. NeXT and NeXTstep were gorgeous, after all. And that hope proved well placed. When the ugly-as-sin Blue and White G3 was announced, I finally made my decision: I bought my first Macintosh.
The rest, as they say, is history. Since then my primary working computer has sometimes been a Linux box, but I've always had a Mac of some kind. OS X has become my standard. I've lived almost my whole working life with Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, being insanely great. I knew he had a Reality Distortion Field, but I also knew I liked having my reality distorted, dammit.
And now that's over. I'm sure Apple will continue to make great products, but the world has a little less passion in it now.
Bye, Steve, and thanks for making things interesting.
I was not always an Apple guy, of course. I grew up in a fairly poor lower middle class blue collar family, and money was tight. Sure, those Apple ][s looked real pretty, but $1200 in 1983 might as well have been ten million dollars, so I knew I wasn't going to get my hands on one. In 1984 I finally convinced my parents that I really needed a computer (a blatant lie, but I'm glad they didn't call my bluff). We ended up bringing home a Commodore 64, for the outrageously bargain-basement price of $299. Of course I fell in love with it, and it shaped my childhood in many ways. I learned to program. I learned how computers work. And I got my first lesson in tech tribalism, hating on those Apple and Atari and Tandy users. Those poor suckers! They didn't even have sprites!
I grew up. Over the intervening years I had an Amiga and a PC clone. And then I went to Cornell, a school totally immersed in the Macintosh. You could not take a CS course at Cornell unless you had a Macintosh or you enjoyed spending lots of hours in the Mac labs. I quickly grew to covet my friends' Macs. Such speed! Such graphics! In many ways much more fun than my 486 running ultra-primitive, pre-1.0 Linux. But... such exorbitant expense! Paying for Cornell and buying a Macintosh was out of the question. No way. So I waited.
Years later I was working in Silicon Valley and Apple was on the brink of extinction. Just as it seemed that BeOS was going to score a major victory, everything changed. Steve Jobs came back. I was a little incredulous, sure, but also hopeful. NeXT and NeXTstep were gorgeous, after all. And that hope proved well placed. When the ugly-as-sin Blue and White G3 was announced, I finally made my decision: I bought my first Macintosh.
The rest, as they say, is history. Since then my primary working computer has sometimes been a Linux box, but I've always had a Mac of some kind. OS X has become my standard. I've lived almost my whole working life with Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, being insanely great. I knew he had a Reality Distortion Field, but I also knew I liked having my reality distorted, dammit.
And now that's over. I'm sure Apple will continue to make great products, but the world has a little less passion in it now.
Bye, Steve, and thanks for making things interesting.