A Visionary Gone

In the wake of the loss of Steve Jobs I just felt like writing my thoughts on the man. It's no secret to anyone that knows me that I am not a fan of current apple products and I have eliminated all of that "stuff" from my life. That being said, it is impossible to deny a few astounding things about Steve Jobs.

He was a visionary like few others. When he and Steve Wosniak started Apple in a garage he immediately saw what personal computing could be before it existed. I now sit here typing a post on the world wide web that almost anyone in any country in the world can access, translate and read if they so choose. I am old enough to remember the beginnings of what we now take for granted as the internet. When I got my first computer, a Color Computer 3 from Radio Shack that had no internet access and about the same amount of memory that your watch has today. I remember my sister getting a "Pentium 90" and sitting at her house watching her chatting online with people around the world. I was amazed. Those were heady times. I got my first computer with internet access, with a 486DX processor..custom built with a 3 1/2" floppy disk drive. It cost me $1500 and the operating system was Windows 3.1. You had to load software from floppy disks onto it to even have internet access available. That  machine opened a whole new world for me.

Steve Jobs was almost like a true psychic. He saw the future of computing at several points and created products that up until then didn't exist. It's not widely known that the Graphical User Interface and the Mouse that we all use today on our PCs or Macs had their first widespread use on Macintosh machines. While they didn't technically invent either one, Steve Jobs had the vision after visiting Xerox Parc (Xerox's research center of the time) that the mouse and GUI would be the breakthrough that would allow anyone to operate a personal computer.

Another impressive thing to me about the man was that in many of his speeches, he always stressed the importance of finding that thing you are passionate about and make it your life's work. While that isn't an option for most of us, it does inspire people and allow them to do the one thing that no one can take away from them. Dream.

Steve Jobs was also the consummate salesman. I mean, does anyone really "need" an Iphone, Ipad, Ipod or Itunes to get their work done daily? No, but his passion convinced hundreds of millions of people that they needed something that had never even existed before. That's Powerful.

Rest in Peace Mr Jobs. Your life was inspiring.