This is a very personal post, but without Steve Jobs and Apple (“-Computer” at the time still), I would not have enjoyed the wonderful, amazing, and crazy ride of the technology industry for more than a quarter of a century now.
I still remember the evening when a roommate at Stanford University burst into our Manzanita Park trailer returning from a “Human Factors in Engineering” course in the late fall of ’83, exclaiming that he had finally been shown a computer that would suit fuzzies like me (my MA is in Linguistics and Psychology). A few months later I was hooked to a first Mac on my dorm room desk, little more than a year later I was the co-owner of an Apple reseller, only to end up spending eight career-defining years with Apple that launched me right into the middle of the tech industry.
Having been there and often tried more than done that it is hard to underestimate the understanding, vision, and the relentless drive that it took to timely democratize the gist of the comparably clumsy Smalltalk windows and Xerox Star workstations plus Jean-Marie Hullot’s Interface Builder into the sleek and effortlessly usable Macs, iPads, and iPhones (as well as their clones) that we all have come to love.
The world’s going to be a more boring place without Steve. I’ll miss him a lot.