Thanks, Steve!

Last night, as we finished giving the baby her dinner, my iPhone dinged with a breaking news alert from the Associated Press: Steve Jobs had died.
 
I grabbed my iPad and pulled up Facebook and watched as my friends all shared the news. I was surprised how many people within my circle of friends posted qoutes, pictures and condolences to a man that most of them have never met.
 
President Obama posted this on Facebook, "And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."
 
I realized that Steve Jobs, more than anyone else, put the personal in Personal Computer.
 
Like many my age, our family's first computer was an Apple II. I remember playing Oregon Trail and learning how to program a simple game using LOGO.
 
During my teenage years, my mom bought a Windows machine and it wasn't until I went to college that I rediscovered the Mac. We used all-in-one Mac Classics to write stories and beige Performas and PowerPCs to layout the college paper.
 
This was a time when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple. I remember talking to the guys in the AV deparmtent about how Apple was going to die. The cover of Wired Magazine featured an Apple logo wearing a crown of thorns with the word “Pray.”
 
And then, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and changed the world. He introduced the bulbous, fruity-flavored iMac. It was something nobody had ever seen. The first computer I ever bought was a Bondi Blue iMac.
 
I started watching every keynote, reading Mac magazines and surfing the fledgling world of Mac websites. I became one of the most vocal evangelists of a company that I saw as an underdog. Apple vs. Microsoft was a David vs. Goliath struggle and I was going to defend and promote them as much as possible.
 
Lately, I haven't had to evangelize as much as I used to. In fact, yesterday I was working out of a Starbucks in suburban Denver and at one point there were six or seven people on laptops and yup, all of them were Macs.
 
I'm sure that Apple will survive without Steve Jobs. Yet, I have to marvel at the timing of his death. The day before he died, Apple announced its latest iteration of the iPhone and a bunch of other new gadgets. It was the first product announcement since Jobs left the company. Its almost as if Steve Jobs knew everything was going to be OK without him.