We lost a great man today
I was sitting at my desk at work, and saw a tweet that seriously caused my heart to skip a beat… “Apple says Steve Jobs has died”. And it was true. I know it sounds trite and ridiculous for someone who was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar international company, but I honestly teared up, and am still in disbelief.
It’s no exaggeration to say that my life would be totally different without Steve Jobs and Apple. We had a second-hand Apple ][e that my uncle gave us, and I spent many an hour playing Wavy Navy. My dad used to bring home his old SE/30 from work and I’d have great fun mucking around in MacPaint and just generally learning how to use it. We always bought Apple machines, even during the mid-90s when just about everyone else had abandoned them. I was the sole Mac user for pretty much the whole of my school career, and was frequently laughed at for it. Now I look around on the train on the way to work and just about everyone has an iPhone, and there’s plenty of Mac laptops as well. How things change.
I ended up getting a job at Apple in 2003, and worked there for six and a half years until our whole call centre was made redundant. I’m not at all bitter, because it worked out brilliantly, I love my current job and wouldn’t have gotten it without having had the job at Apple to begin with.
I can’t even imagine how life would have turned out if not for Steve and Apple.
RIP, Steve. We’ll miss you.