RIP Steve Jobs
I'm watching a retrospective on Anderson360 less than an hour after Steve Jobs death announcement was made, and the impact Apple has had on my life is hitting me full force.
I was 15 and in Grade 10 when I heard of Apple Computer the first time. I heard that school was building a computer lab using Apple IIc's to replace the card-reader Fortran lab. That was 1981. I saw the original Macintosh ad - although on the news, not during the Superbowl. I watched with jealousy anyone who had, or had access to, the original Macintosh. I didn't know it at the time but I already had an acute aversion to PCs (as in "IBM compatible"), and an allegiance to Apple.
It would be ten years before I was able to afford my first Mac, but in the meantime I studied them, pined for, longed for , dreamed of, a new Mac. In my 1985, my second year of college, PC's were starting to show up at school. My mom bought me an electric typewriter, and instead of backspacing my mistakes, I went through gallons of whiteout. After college I got married, and in 1994, together with my wife, we bought our first Macintosh - a Powermac6100/60AV. It was too late to use it for college, and to be honest, we played with it for a few days, and thought - now what? I was a little disillusioned with the computer and had trouble finding things to do with it. It took a few months to explore the possibilities, and found that it was most useful for communicating with other people - but how? I signed up for a Compuserve account, using those free floppy disks they used to mass mail to everybody. That was fine for email - but for fun I signed up for Mactropolis, a local Winnipeg Bulletin Board Service (BBS). In Mactropolis, I joined online games, had access to Mac programs not available anywhere else, and chatted with fellow Mac users.
In the same year - 1994 - Mactropolis sent out a notice asking its users if they intended to stick with Mactropolis when the Internet came to Winnipeg. I replied 'of course, why not? This is a great place to be'. I did 'subscribe' to the internet when it came - through WpgOnRamp.ca - and that became my first real internet email address -
sawatzky@wpgonramp.ca. The Internet was small then, but confusing with Gopher terminals, FTP sites, USEnet, and more BBS's that you could shake a stick at. To make sense of all this I sunk hundreds of dollars in internet magazines, and I signed up for yet
another service - eWorld, an Apple only web service to rival Compuserve and the new AmericaOnline. eWorld had it's own email service, but it collapsed soon after its birth. With the Internet growing steadily I found Compuserve to be redundant, so I dropped that too. Mactropolis quietly left the scene. WpgOnRamp got swallowed up by someone and I changed my Internet Service Provider to a new startup - escape.ca. Rates were low at $20 month for more hours than I needed, so we stuck with them for several years. Eventually they got swallowed up by Manitoba Telephone System, and they still service that domain. With the rate hikes, we moved on to the new internet giant in town - @home.com. That was our third real email address. One more change would bring us to our present address - the buyout of @home.com by SHAW Communications. All of this happened on our Powermac 6100/60AV.
When the newness of the internet wore off (around 1998), and it became a necessary part of life, and when we could finally afford a replacement, and when I went back to school for training for a 'second' career (as if you could call my previous job a career), and when Steve Jobs returned to Apple from a too long hiatus, we bought our second Mac - a 'Dalmation' (spotted blue) 600mHz iMac with USB and no floppy disk drive.
I have to stop - Steve Wozniak is on TV.
OK, So the Dalmation iMac died - but only the tube. The electronic guts are hanging in my backroom ready to sell or turn into a - something or other. We replaced that with a Mac Mini with Intel duoCore, which is still in service, and then with multiple MacBooks and iPods... So with the prices falling and number of devices rising, our contribution to Apple has been substantial.
I can attribute my second career directly to Steve Jobs. Because of the Apple, and the Apple IIc in high school, and Adobe Photoshop from the first version on, and other great applications for the Mac, I wanted to get into computer programming. I didn't aim for business programming - which is where I'm stuck now, but I work for a great company and I'm happy here.
I learned about the death of Steve - on a device he created (those were President Obama's words actually). It really tears me up to think of a world without Steve Jobs.
RIP Steve.
