A moment to honor Steve Jobs

I became an Apple fan in 1986.  (Actually I started on the Apple IIe, where I played with writing code and tried to make games -yes, I was a closet geek- before 1986 but that wasn’t when I fell in love with the computer.)  Then I got to Dartmouth.  Freshman Week.  Fall 1986.   We had a huge college computer distribution day.  My first computer. 

A 512K Mac.

I know that my kids wristwatch likely has more computing power than my first computer did.  But I loved it. 

I went to a talk last night (Common Ground speaker about True Grit and your Adversity Quotient). The talk was in Portola Valley- a stones throw from Woodside-  the entire audience in shock and sadness at the days news.  The woman started with a tribute to Steve Jobs, citing his speech he gave at Stanford University.  He talks about having a passion for what you do.  He overcame diversity.  And simple things, like his auditing of a calligraphy class, let to fantastic things- the diversity and spacing of the fonts on the computer.  What seemed to be a random “dot” as he would say, connected to the other dots later to make an elegant, incredible computer, iphone, and ipad.

So here is a moment to honor you.  I don’t know if anyone will read this, but I wanted to thank you for inspiring me (and it looks like a lot of the world), from my first 512K Mac, to the beautiful photos I can take and email to my family from my iPhone.  And inspiring hopefully a new generation to follow their passions dive deep into whatever that passion is.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/06/141120359/read-and-watch-steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address?ps=cprs