I owe a lot to Steve Jobs. I guess we all do in some way: all the phone app developers, open source coders, digital cartoon artists, video editors, the musicians who can sell music on iTunes. This is in addition to everyone else who uses or makes a living on a Mac, iPad or iPhone, and has an option in computing other than what Microsoft produces.
But for some of us, Steve Jobs was always there. When I was 13 years old I saved my money to buy an Apple II. I learned to program it, took it apart, put it together, and patiently used a cassette player (yes, a cassette player) to save and load programs that fit into 16K of memory. I listened to everything Steve Jobs said. Computing only got better after that, but learning to work on an Apple II was a formative experience.
My bet is that innovation on the iPhone and iPad will have a bigger impact on computing than the Macintosh.
I've posted the video link for Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. Thanks Steve for all you did in life, including your last act of making us all aware that life is very, very short.
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