Jobs

I first encountered Apple in the days of the Apple ][ when my school had only a single computer, with a green-tinted monochrome monitor, and a feeling of turbo-charged potential compared to my own ZX81.

My first Apple program, a dancing stick man typed in from a listing printed in a computer magazine of the day, was the merest hint of the excitement to come.

A few years later, and while an impoverished student, I spent my beer and food money on my first Mac. Sober and hungry, there was never a sense of regret. It truly was the computer for the rest of us, it was a computer which connected with the user.

A few years, a couple of Macs, and even a couple of Newtons later I was part of a group of developers that helped support new programmers to the Mac platform. Even in a beige-boxed, Jobs-less period, with many a pundit predicting the company's demise, the heart of Apple was beating strong in the user community.

And then Steve Jobs returned. And with him the technology that would become the new Mac OS X, and leadership and vision that would revolutionise Apple and the industry.

Without Apple, and to a great extent without Jobs, the world would be a very different place. A place in which the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Nokia repeatedly released mind-numbing products for their corporate customers, and the rest of us did without or muddled along.

Without Apple as a catalyst my interest in software development, and passion for quality user experience, would not be as it is. Even reading the original Inside Macintosh developer documentation was an enjoyable user experience - one in which the user feels at the heart of the process. This attitude has influenced me as a two bit developer over the years, and continues to do so as an educator today.

Today is not a sad day because I will miss the co-founder of a Silicon Valley computer manufacturer, I never met the man. Today is a sad day because my life, like so many others, is partly how it is because of Steve Jobs the visionary - I know it, and I am grateful.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.