October 5, 2011

RIP Steve Jobs

The first computer I ever bought for myself was an original Mac.

I bought it in 1984, the year it first came out. It had 128k of memory (the "Fat Mac" with 512k came out a couple of years later) and one floppy disk drive. It was bundled with MacWrite, MacPaint, and I think that was it. (Was there a spreadsheet for it back then? I can't really remember)

It cost about $3,000 (I doubt I was making $3,000/mo at the time. Imagine what I could buy with a month's salary now!) and it was almost completely impractical.

I have never felt better about any purchase in my life.

That original Mac was about the coolest thing I had laid my hands on. I had been working in the Software business for about three years at that point (I was 27 years old. 2 years younger than Steve Jobs) and had plenty of experience with Command Line (look it up) driven interfaces. Just sitting down to the Mac was a revelation.

Steve Jobs did  that.

I would like to thank him for that, and everything else he has done.

He changed the world.

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