Photo by Diane Walker.

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When Steve Jobs died, everyone wrote something about him. Lots of people wrote about how innovative he was and how many amazing things he created. Those were good and important, but the stories I enjoyed the most were the more personal memories of Steve Jobs or the ways Apple products have somehow nudged the paths of someone’s life in one way or another. A Macintosh has been a pretty consistent presence in my life, so I wanted to share some of my memories. With a little bit of distance from the actual day Jobs died, I was able to re-read this and clean up some of the sentimentality. You’ll still be able to tell how connected I am to Apple products and how inspired I’ve been many times by Jobs himself.
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Since the age of two when my dad brought home a Mac SE there have been very few days in which I haven’t used an Apple product. Steve Jobs died last week. He was an incredible influence on my life. In my past, as an Apple Store employee, he was an inspirational boss. Now I am a copywriter at a design firm and he is an undeniable source of inspiration and admiration across the design industry. All throughout, Steve created products that I have loved using, just about every day. These are moments in time captured from the portion of my life that included both Apple and Steve Jobs.
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I spent hours and hours playing a game called Football on that SE. I didn’t know the rules of football. It didn’t matter. The players were X’s, playing their hearts out on an overhead view of a lined black and white grid that was a football field. On defense, I chose Blitz! every time from the menu. Because it had an exclamation point. I never won a game. It didn’t matter.
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I spent even longer playing The Manhole. It was made by Rand and Robin Miller, who would go on to create Myst. The Manhole was black and white, or maybe four shades of gray. I clicked through the world and interacted with a talking rabbit inside of a fire hydrant and a walrus that paddled my rowboat for me. One of the three French phrases I know, I learned from the Manhole. ‘Bonjour, mon ami.’ It wouldn’t be until many years later that I found out I knew how to say ‘Hello, my friend’ in French.

We were missing one of the floppy disks for the Manhole. Going to certain parts of the world would ask for a disk that I was unable to provide. It didn’t matter. I kept going there, hoping one time that I wouldn’t need the disk. That Macintosh gave me a sense of magic for me, anything could happen. Maybe the data would just show up.
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I learned about graphic design on that computer, with the Print Shop. I wrote a poem about Halloween. Every word was in a different font, and I chose a skeuomorphic frame for the border. I placed a clip art pumpkin at the bottom and printed it out on our ImageWriter II. I ripped a corner pulling those spool strips off the side.

I didn’t know at the time about Steve Jobs, and even though he had been fired from Apple by then, that it was his innovation tunnel vision that created the Macintosh that I was using. I was just a little kid falling in love with computers.
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For Christmas in 1996, my family got a Performa 636CD. That computer wasn’t created by Steve Jobs—just look at it’s title. But he was still present. The software embodied his spirit. System 7 didn’t have proper multitasking, but it felt familiar and right. Like a Mac OS should. I laid on the floor in our living room playing Monkey Island 2 that day until it was time to go to my Grandmother’s house for Christmas dinner. I didn’t know it then that I would play the same game 15 years later on something called an iPhone.
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I wasn’t allowed to have a Nintendo. I used that Performa to discover real video games: Prince of Persia 2, Myst, Monkey Island 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Almost every LucasArts game. I talked my mom into taking me to the Portland State University bookstore. It was the only place in Portland that I knew sold Macintosh software. I bought a game called Arcade America. I tried to install it. 8MB of RAM wasn’t enough. That was how I learned about RAM, and how to turn on a Virtual Disk. That was how I learned to fix computers.
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I subscribed to MacAddict and Macworld. I modified resource files with ResEdit. I installed ~Aaron when Copland was delayed and Kaleidescope when I got bored of that. I was constantly moving icons, changing settings. I couldn’t sit still. I was a shark.
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None of my friends had Apple Computers. They had cool games for their Windows 95 computers. I wasn’t sold, using the Mac OS felt so much more realized. It felt like home. I didn’t know what user experience was, but I could appreciate a good one.
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We got a 14.4k modem and I fell head over heels in love with the internet. America OnLine allowed for five accounts. I got my own email address. Then I built my own webpage. I coded it by hand and hosted it at members.aol.com. Mostly I just had links to things I liked and to my friend Quinn’s website. I got tired of coding and installed Claris HomePage. Every two weeks I changed the date on our computer so the trial version would never expire.
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I wanted a faster computer. I wanted a Mac with a PowerPC chip. Dad wouldn’t buy one, but I was single minded. Every morning I looked at the classifieds in the newspaper for people selling their Mac. I had no money but I called every single person trying to sell their Apple Computer in the Oregonian one summer. I asked each of them how firm they were on the price. They were quite firm.
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I filled up the Performa’s 256MB hard drive. We bought a Zip Drive. Zip disks could hold 100MB. They seemed enormous. I had my own. I wrote “John’s Disk, don’t touch!!!” on it. I was proud of my disk and tried to fill it up with saved games and ClarisWorks files. I’m sure I didn’t.
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When I was 11 I befriended an older couple, Gene and Niki. I thought I helped them with their computer problems. I see now that they were probably just letting a very enthusiastic boy play with their computers, which were fancier than his. Gene had a Powerbook 3400C, Niki had a Powerbook 1400. They never paid me. I never expect them to, I was just having fun.
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I went to help out Gene, and he showed me a computer I had never seen before. It was a laptop and it had a rainbow Apple logo on the top. Gene gave it to me, without pretense. Actually, he sold it to me for $1. He didn’t want people to know that he just gave it to me, but he wanted to just give it to me because he saw my genuine passion an enthusiasm about Apple computers. I was 11 and I couldn’t think of anything better than having my own Macintosh.
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The computer Gene gave me was a Powerbook 540. It was old and outdated. It didn’t matter. It was my own Macintosh. It was the greatest Macintosh. It had a built in modem. I plugged it into the phone line and downloaded every piece of information about the Powerbook 540 that AltaVista could show me. I printed all of it and carried the documents with me every time I carried that laptop with me.
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My Dad brought home a beige G3 from work. I tried hard to not be obnoxiously excited. I plugged everything in and set it up. I set the desktop background to match a poster I had hanging in my bedroom. It was an Apple advertisement that showed a snail with a Pentium II chip on it’s shell. The G3 made Pentium computers look slow. I believed it. That G3 felt faster than anything I’d used before.
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Steve Jobs was back at Apple. I was aware of him and his contributions. People were worried about Apple ceasing to exist. I wasn’t worried. Steve made me optimistic. Shortly after, he would introduce the iMac. It was bondi blue. It was translucent. It was shaped like that. I couldn’t believe what it looked like.
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Shortly after that, Steve introduced the iPod. I wanted one, but it was $500. I knew one person that owned an iPod, Greg Peterson. Sometimes he let me listen to it. I didn’t really listen, I just played with the interface and the wheel. I was jealous.
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For my birthday one year, I got my first iPod. It had four buttons that glowed red. I could never tell if I had pressed them or not. The battery life was pretty poor. The black foam covers fell off of the white headphones sometime during the first week I had it. It didn’t matter. My entire music collection with was with me, all of the time.
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Years and computers later, Steve Jobs hired me. In the roundabout sense. I worked at an Apple Store, but go up the line and somewhere Steve was my boss. He wrote us e-mails. They were mass e-mails but I didn’t care. They were inspirational, they were appreciative. They were focused. It was clear that the same vision and desire for perfection he has with Apple products, he also had for the retail stores. Whether or not he genuinely cared about his retail employees, he knew we were important. He knew we sold his computers.
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I bought an iPhone 3G the first day I could. I can’t overstate how much that thing has changed my day to day use of computers. My information addiction has grown exponentially. I’m addicted to Twitter, to Tumblr, to every NBA blog. I love it.
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I now work in the field of design. Steve Jobs’ influence is too widespread to really describe. It is everywhere. This isn’t news, but it’s as pervasive as you would think. If not more so.
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I learned that Steve Jobs died while I was using one of the products he created, a Macbook Air. Nostalgia dictates that it isn’t my favorite Macintosh, but I know it’s the best. It was the messenger that, outside of my parents, perhaps the most enabling presence in my life had died. I’m a copywriter by trade. I learned to write and tell a story on paper, but I made it matter using his products. I built and honed my abilities, always on an Apple keyboard connected to a Macintosh. I’ve typed literally hundreds of thousands of words into his machines. I’ve read millions.
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I was more affected than I expected to be would be when Steve Jobs died (as if I think about how affected I’ll be when anyone dies). He was a giant. He made Apple, he made the Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and Pixar. He was more right than anyone else in computing, in mobile computing, in music, in retail, even in movie making. He shaped so many of our interests and abilities. What a life.
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Steve Jobs was a hero of mine. I’ll miss him.