We've Lost One of the Greats

I have to say I was shocked by the news of Steve Jobs passing when I woke up this morning and saw it. I mean, we all knew it was coming, but it was still a shock to finally see it. Steve wasn't much older than I am now, and had figured prominently in my life from the time I was about 7 years old.

You see, I grew up one town over from Cupertino back when Silicon Valley was still nothing but orchards. My dad was Steve Jobs's mailman during the day, and at night he was the bartender at Cicero's Pizza, a popular hangout with the Apple founders (interesting side note: they were lousy tippers back then).

Steve Jobs almost singlehandedly put Silicon Valley on the map. I know this will be tough for a lot of you to imagine, but the Christmas I got my first Atari 2600 I saw the world of computers open up to me. Many don't know this, but Jobs worked at Atari before founding Apple. To give you an idea of how huge Atari was back then, go rent the movie Blade Runner. The Atari symbol figures prominently into Ridley Scott's vision of a dystopian future.

A lot of people don't know how Jobs really got started, but it was with a simple phone call when he was 12 years old. Back then you could just pick up the White Pages and look someone up. I don't think I knew anyone who had an unlisted number. So Steve Jobs just called Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard one night when he was in eighth grade looking for parts for a school project. Hewlett chuckled and put together a bag of parts for the kid to pick up the following week. They got to know each other, and Jobs took a summer job at HP. The rest is history.

I can remember getting really interested in computers and programming in the late 70's, and the Apple IIe was the gold standard for home programmers at the time. It even came with its own monitor, which was unheard of at the time (most computers back then just plugged into your TV). Unfortunately, we couldn't afford the IIe, so I had to wait a couple years for the Commodore VIC-20 (which I later upgraded to the Commodore 64 - think about that: 64 kilobytes of RAM. I didn't know what to do with all that power.).

In 1984, Jobs launched the iconic Macintosh. My high school computer lab had three or four of them, along with a half dozen or so IBM PCs. The war between Apple and Microsoft was going full scale, and if Silicon Valley had a face it was definitely that of Steve Jobs.

It was about the time I started getting really interested in the stock market when Steve Jobs had his spectacular fall from grace and was thrown out of his own company. I remember wondering to myself how that could possibly happen. How could Steve Jobs - I mean, be serious, we're talking about Steve Jobs here - be forced into exile by some office pogue? But it happened. And Apple went straight downhill afterward.

Steve's triumphant return to the company he founded did nothing less than change the world we live in today. His innovation, his focus on customer experience, his emphasis on design and style have all forced his competitors into a perpetual game of catch-up. Steve Jobs saw the world as it was and wasn't satisfied, so he set about creating the world he wanted to live in. He often ruled that world with an iron fist, which is the reason and don't (and will not) own any Apple products, but no one could ever accuse him of being wishy-washy.

There are not many men I've been aware of my entire life. I even ran into him a few times growing up. And if I have to point to one guy who changed the world for all of humanity, it's either him or Bill Gates or Tim Berners-Lee (but to be fair, Berners-Lee couldn't have done what he did without the other two before him).

We have definitely lost one of the giants of humanity, and the world is a poorer place today for it.

Rest in peace, Steve. Thank you for a lifetime of inspiration.