A Shanty No Lemon Tech Thank You Steve Jobs

Thank You Steve Jobs

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My Apple IIe was our first family computer. My school had Texas Instruments and TRS-80’s, but the Apple IIe was my first real love. I had that machine for seven years until the ‘T’ key simple would not type anymore. I begged and pleaded my parents for a new Macintosh and finally they used that thing that my Dad never used called a ‘credit-card’ to buy us one.

 

I had seen IBM machines and thought not only were the machines ugly, but the interface was horrendous! What was all this text you saw when the machine started up? What did you ever need to know that? My Apple IIe was the simplest and the most FUN computer I ever owned. You just turned on the machine and it worked beautifully and it NEVER crashed!

 

So we bought our first Macintosh one week before I went to college. It was a Performa which I insisted on getting because you could put an Apple IIe card inside of it and run Apple IIe software on it in emulation mode. The very next week came a BIG announcement on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer ‘MICROSOFT GIVES APPLE XX BILLION’. My dad threw this in my face as he felt that he had just purchased a piece of crap and his investment had just been shot in the foot. I responded passionately ‘You just wait Dad, one day Apple will be kicking Microsoft’s butt! You just wait!’

 

I can’t tell you how many times I had arguments with individuals over which was the better system, Apple or Microsoft. Besides having to listen to numerous butt-jokes and comments like ‘Apple is on its final legs’ I had to actually educate people on graphic interface design, and even what Photoshop was! It amazed me how everyone would settle for less just to play a video game. While I enjoyed a video game now-and-then I was more of a creator. I preferred making a website over playing Quake (Although stringing an Apple talk cable across my apartment to my neighbor Jason’s just to play multi-person Quake was a thrill of a lifetime).

 

Needless to say, Apple was slowly rebounding and other people couldn’t see it, nor did they want to. What really got my aggravated is that I didn’t care about multi-threaded multitasking, or even the fact that occasionally, for no reason the whole system would lock up under MacOS 9. I knew why Apple was better. It had a better user-interface, it was more intuitive to a person who was educated and/or artistic and it just looked better! I also felt buying Windows was buying a generic form of a product. Like when you buy that store-brand pop and then realize that it isn’t really as good as Coke or Pepsi. It takes you less mouse clicks to get stuff done on a Mac and it’s for people who wanted to get stuff ‘done’, not people who wanted to be wastes of society.

 

So throughout the glorious nineties I stood fast to my belief that Apple was a better system, and this was even before the glorious days of MacOS X yet to come. Steve Jobs came back to Apple and I knew as every fan-boy did that he was going to turn it around. When the first iMac took off and all my college friends were buying it, I knew Apple was on the right path again. When I got my first G3, my first brand-spanking powerhouse, I was in love again. Still the nay-sayers would continue to mock Apple, make fun of their 2% market share all the while I would go-about explaining to them logic, reason, user-interface-design and of course telling them to ‘just wait.’

 

Time went on and I went through numerous Apple machines. My beige G3, my blue and white G3, my G4, my other G4, my G5, my iBook, and now my iMac(s). Now granted I had two machines at this point because quite simply I couldn’t get a job anywhere that allowed me to use a Mac, and at the time Windows 2000 really was a pretty decent system. It wasn’t until I got my first stand-alone iMac several years ago that I ditched the Windows machine all together. I didn’t need to have two systems anymore and if I did need a Windows machine, work would provide that for me. I could do everything and run everything on a Mac at home!

 

I also have had an iPod, an iPhone and now an iPad. In fact when I got my first iPhone and realized how cool it was to be the first kid on the block with the device everyone wanted to see I came to the realization that not only had Apple finally turned everything around but also that I was right so many years ago! All those years of listening to people who only wanted to put me down, for no other reason that they simply didn’t want to deal with something or someone who was ‘different’; well.. I was suddenly vindicated. My instinct has proven me right!

 

And thus Apple is now the biggest most powerful company in the world. Steve Jobs proved to us that you could really follow your dream and make it happen. No matter what people say to you, how many times someone tells you are ‘wrong’ or a ‘moron’, if you truly believe in something then go for it. The biggest problem I have seen with society is that if you don’t conform to the norm, you get scrutinized. This has been my story since my youth and it even follows me to this day (although I much more mentally stable now to deal with ignorant assholes.)

 

And don’t get me started on how Android douche bags (not everyone is a douche) don’t see how they wouldn’t even have their Droid phone if Google didn’t steal the design from Apple. He we go again although this time with Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO, I don’t see Apple losing the race this time.

 

With Apple’s last earnings call I forwarded an email to my dad saying ‘See I told you, you should of listened to my younger 18-year-old self. Ha ha!”

 

And now at a job where not only do we have Macs, but people are clamoring for them in all work place environments (you can run Windows on them too), I can safety say that it’s been a long journey but I got to experience the ‘Second Coming of Jobs!’

 

So Thank You Steve Jobs. You saved us for mediocrity and you saved ME from the ‘stones and arrows’ of the bullies of the world. You gave us HOPE, you gave us DREAMS all the expense of having to work with people who stole your ideas and then claimed they invented them. You not only showed them that truth and vision wins out in the end, but if you do things the right way the ‘first time’ you get better results. So once again, Thank You Steve Jobs, for most of all, giving me my life and my inspiration that has gotten me to where I am today.

 

 

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