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.