Steve Jobs gave my children's grandmother a voice

My first computer was a Mac.

Winding down my college years I was like most twenty-somethings and looking for something to do with my life - a means to pay rent, stock the fridge, and become part of the professional world. In my case, being in film school meant finding something creative to do. Some old friends from high school and university had gotten together and formed an advertising agency. It wasn't the biggest shop in town (three guys) but they were doing innovative things and taking on printed projects in a very efficient way. They were doing color layout and printing using a new type of desktop computer called a Macintosh (Macintosh SE to be exact). Color documents such as menus, brochures, fliers, were being created using Mac Write and Mac Paint. The program had several fonts to chose from and you could assign color to text and shapes! You could copy/paste text and shift elements around in a desktop graphical interface using a mouse! I'd actually used a mouse before for editing digital audio on DOS machines. I din't like it much as I believed myself to be faster using arrow and command keys rather than clicking and dragging (I got over it). But, Oh! The Mac! There I sat at the dawn of desktop publishing age and didn't even realize the revolution had started.

The journey continued and a couple of years later I had migrated to Photoshop and one of the first AVID Media Composer non-linear editing suites in town - installed on a Mac II. Apple and the Mac had become an integral part of my professional and personal life. I was a fan. But it wasn't until my good friend Erik came home with a PowerBook 500 that I knew I had to start saving up for the next PowerBook model. My very first laptop and own home computer was the PowerBook 5300CE. Infrared file transfer was very cool, and I couldn't wait to get my CompuServe account up and running.

Life after that has included 2 x G4 stationary machines, 2 x Cinema Displays, 2 clam-shell iBooks (lime green), a new iMac, a G4 PowerBook, an intel MacBook Pro, 2 iPods, 1 iPod Nano, 1 iPod Touch and an iPad2. And i loved them all as much as I loved watching Steve Jobs come on stage a couple of times a year and reveal to the world what the next cool tech item was that I would be adding to my shopping list, and how much easier entertainment and communication would be. How much more fun we all could have.

The best testament I can give to the greatness of Steve's vision and dedication to simplicity and elegance is this: My mother, who is into her 80's (sorry, Mom but it's important to the story) began her computer literacy on an iMac in 1998. This was so  we could chat on CompuServe and bounce emails (I live in Stockholm, she is in Denver). She picked it up quickly and as online communication evolved we moved to video via iChat, and Skype. She's now on her second iPhone and not too many weeks ago we had a nice morning/afternoon chat over Facetime on our iPads (yes, my 80+ year-old mother has an iPad2). There we sat. I in my kitchen and Mom sitting up in her bed with morning toast and coffee on the nightstand. Two iPads in hand. My daughters behind me waving to Grandma. Sharing a moment inspired and realized by a catalytic force pushing the boundaries of the tech industry. Technology itself cannot change humanity on its own. Passionate visionaries who believe in the dream are the ones that can bridge the gap between technology and life, and successfully bring it to the masses. They are the ones who "Stay hungry. Stay Foolish".

Thank you, Steve, for innovation so elegant and simple that 80 year-old great grandmothers get it as easily as a four year-old child so that I can open my iPad and just ping her on the other side of the world. I can't help but feel the next 30 years will be much less exciting without you and that I must now make peace with the notion of waiting even longer for the next big thing. You will be missed.