Steve Jobs

Well, by now I don’t think anyone in the world doesn’t know that Steve Jobs passed away. There are countless obituaries and stories of his life all written by people who knew him (I didn’t know him), who knew much more about him than I do, and who could write about him much better than I can. Countless bloggers have also written their piece about him or quoted him or just honored him. Most better than I could do. Two great posts to look at are one from the Boomer Cafe, a great baby boomer blog, and one from The Bold Life, a great blog that I have been following. Go there for some thoughts and quotes about Steve Jobs. Search the Internet and you will find many articles from all of the top newspapers and magazines, like CNN, Time, and The New York Times.

So why do I have to write about Steve Jobs? Well this blog is a blog for baby boomers, and as I pointed out in my post Would There be a World Wide Web without Baby Boomers, Steve Jobs was one of us, a baby boomer, without whom many of us would never have gotten into using today’s technology. That’s why I want to write about Steve Jobs, because without his inspired vision and great inventions or Apple Computers, I would probably not be writing this blog. It is safe to say that he inspired me. And he probably inspired countless other baby boomers, too.

The first home computer I saw at a friend’s house, back in the 1980′s, was an Apple IIE. What a great computer, with two big floppy drives making it a really fancy one. I really started to get into computers then. The first computer that I bought was an Apple IIGS, the first Apple II with a colored screen. I had two floppy drives, but mine where the  smaller 3 1/2 inch ones. Not those big ones wrapped in paper. These guys held much more memory. My next computer was a Macintosh LC, the first Mac with a colored screen. And it even had a hard drive. A whopping 80 megabytes.  Then I a got Mac Performa. One of the first Mac bundles, computers with special software built in). It was one of the first Macs with the new Power PC chip. Really fast for the late 1990′s. It’s still sitting around the house.

As a special education teacher, I used Apple II computers with my handicapped adult students. I opened them up and installed special adaptive cards. With these cards a student who couldn’t use a keyboard could use the computer with other devices, like a big button or head pointer, to input data. Our school even used Apple Newtons (if you remember those, you get special credit) to keep track of student records. OK, the Newton was the first Apple handheld computer. Like a big Palm Pilot or something. It even came with handwriting recognition (which wasn’t so perfect). Later, I wrote a grant and received money to set up a lab of Macintosh computers for the students, which I networked using the Appletalk protocol. Those were the days.

As we left the 90′s and headed into the new millennium, for various reasons, I left the Mac world and headed to PCs. Maybe the software companies where I am now doing technical writing didn’t use Macs so much. That’s the irony here, I am typing this out on a Windows computer. But I am slowly heading back into the fold. I have my iPod, almost bought an iPad, and will have an iPhone one of these days. And, of course I really want one of those great iMacs.

So you see, without Apple computer and Steve Jobs I would never have started on my journey where I have worked with and began to understand computer technology so that I can use it to help myself and others in everyday life. I am not a programmer, I am a computer user. And like the ads said, Apple is the computer for the rest of us. So thank you Steve Jobs for your vision. And I will  continue to keep the memory alive by being an Apple fan(boy) as always.

I hope you liked this post. If this is your first time here, click the Previous Posts button and take a look at the blog. It’s still kind of new here so it’s easy to poke around. This blog is for us baby boomers. It is meant to help us use today’s new technology in our daily lives.  If you like what you see, sign up to get notified of all the future posts. Use the email sign up form on the right or any of the other buttons, such as RSS or Twitter. And don’t forget to tell a friend.

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