Thoughts on the death of Steve Jobs ...

There hasn't been a day that way in the back of my mind I haven't thanked both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for inventing the Apple Computer. And for Jobs doing what he did to develop the Mac and all the other products that came out of his ideas and his talented staff.

I can remember how it used to be when I would spend HOURS writing out computer programs by hand, typing them into punch cards and having to cart around huge printouts for a simple computer program.

When the Apple I came out I was amazed when I saw it at Homebrew. When the Apple ][ came out, I could type a letter, keep track of my finances, or play a game, not on a tiny orange or green screen but in color.

When the Mac came out, I avoided using one because I was so angry about Job's abandoning the Apple ][ line and the Apple ][ GS in favor of the Mac. It took me years to get around to using one and I wouldn't use one until I got one in color, I'd already dealt with enough green screen programs to last me a lifetime.

But what Jobs and Woz did was freed us from the drudgery of having to know what was IN the personal computer.

On a pc, I had to know what a dll was. How to interact with DOS or Windows and try to get programs that didn't want to work with each other to work.

With an Apple ][ ( I still have 2 Apple ][s, a ][c, ][e, and 2 ][ GS's ) & later with the Mac you didn't HAVE to know a damned thing about how the inside of the computers worked. You turned it on, ran the program, game, utility and went.

And Jobs was never satisifed with what he did yesterday. He was still in hacker mode. He always wanted to tweak the computers and products that he and his workers came up with. Not only to make it work better, but to look better ( it took years for the PC to stop being ugly ) and to give the public what HE thought they could and should use.

I can now play a thousand songs on my Ipod. 25 years or so ago I was dragging around a briefcase of cassette tapes to play music in a Walkman on my hip. Now all that music fits into something less than the size of a dime.

Jobs was not the nicest person in the world, the negative stories about his are legendary.

But he changed how we used computers, phones and listened to music and had fun doing it.

RIP Steve Jobs and thanks for giving us all the chance to use the products you saw in your mind.

I think that Apple's going to be just fine and that there are probably other visionairies working there who will create stuff that will ahve the spirit of innovation that Jobs had. Jobs didn't do it alone, he had help and had talented people to help him do it.