If a butterfly flaps its wings in Cupertino…

It’s not often that someone you’ve never met dies and you can’t help but think how profoundly different your own life would be had that person never lived… but that’s the case for me today with the passing of Steve Jobs.

I look back on my own journey with gratitude for having found myself in San Francisco’s Bay Area in the late 80’s stationed there as a member of the US Navy. As an ex-pat musician for whom being in a band wasn’t looking probable over the next few years, I was fortunate enough to have walked into the Oakland Guitar Center one Saturday afternoon in April of ‘88 where one of the seminal moments of my life would occur. A discussion with a sales rep named Drac, who soon became a good friend and musical accomplice, turned me on to the knowledge that with this new computer called Macintosh and a software package called Vision, I could connect MIDI-equipped keyboards (also a relatively new technology at the time) to the Mac and create music on my own, sans the band. I frantically began saving my money and on November 1st of that year, bought my first Mac… a Macintosh Plus that I paid $1,180 for, I still have the sales receipt and the computer which speaks to the ‘Cult of Mac’ that Jobs created.

From there it was literally the opening of Pandora’s Box. Although I remain active using Mac’s for music to this day, it quickly became apparent that the computer could be used for a lot more than that and I was interested in all of it… Painting, drawing, animating… layout, typography and printing tech… and believe it or not, the internet was still 8 years from becoming a reality. Being so close to Apple there in San Francisco was also a major boon in terms of exposure to people also keenly interested in the Macintosh… Trips to a little software boutique store called Mac Orchard in Berkeley was a place I could often be found, rummaging through the bins of shareware (on 3.5 floppies) and talking to like-minded folks, many of whom were the authors of the software I was taking home after every visit…

I was also very fortunate to have been one of the earlier members of BMUG, the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, which was the largest Macintosh Group in the world at the time… Thursday night meetings were epic on the campus of UC Berkeley… and when I had to miss one due to military responsibilities I would near tears… it was at those meetings that I heard Guy Kawasaki speak, the original Mac evangelist… extremely knowledgable and inspirational for anyone who has had the pleasure of his insight… I also heard speak and met Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, both members of the original Mac design team and at the bottom of this photo… Atkinson also being the inventor of Hypercard, a precursor to Macromedia’s Director which exists to this day as Adobe Flash, that was another multi-year obsession of mine… and sad to say, especially on this day, that I was deployed in the North Pacific the Thursday evening that Steve Jobs spoke to the assembled BMUGgers… one of the greatest senses of loss I’ve ever felt for having missed something…

And that’s where I find myself today, missing something… the loss more nostalgic than anything else… I could tell a hundred more Mac-related stories that were all, in one way or another, enabled by Steve Jobs. I feel no anxiety or any threat towards Apple’s continued world-leading design and innovation. Of the hundreds of qualities Steve Jobs obviously possessed, a thoughtfulness towards his own legacy was chief amongst them. Apple is a company with a blueprint for the future and a talent pool that’s second to none for fulfilling that vision… it’s just profoundly sad that Steve didn’t get another couple decades to witness where his vision would take the world. But on the flip-side, his was a life force that literally changed the world, and none but a handful can ever make that claim.

The computer for the rest of us… that was the notion that grabbed me. Like millions of others I was never too concerned with how computers worked… just that they did…. and for all those whose lives were inspired and enabled by Steve Jobs imagination, determination and ultimate contributions, the world is certainly an emptier place today… he will be sorely missed.

Godspeed Mr. Jobs… and thanks for everything.