[leveller] Farewell Steve
- From: "Ray Gardener" <rayg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <leveller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 20:01:10 -0700
As many places are reporting, Steve Jobs, chairman of the board of Apple and
former CEO, passed away today at the age of 56.
I just wanted to say, for what it's worth, he was someone I admired. He was
there doing great things from the beginning of my IT career, and was doing
them right up to the very end of his all-too-short life. I always envied his
ability to pursue quality at a level I wish I could. Too often I find it a
struggle; he made it look easy.
Occasionally, people are impressed by something I've done and I tell them,
it shows what is possible if you stick at things. But Steve Jobs did that
much better, he really showed what is possible. While most everyone else was
incrementally trying to improve the status quo, he went and reinvented it.
He didn't wait for the future, he created it. We are all so much further
ahead because of this extraordinary individual.
Before I was a programmer, I was a typesetter using Macs and
Illustrator/PageMaker to make a living. Even that far back, Apple saved me
the headache of having to use the PC, which was nowhere near that ease of
use at the time for that type of work. Today I carry around an iPhone 4
which has vastly more computing power and display quality than the first
machines I learned on in school. Sometimes I have to pause and reflect on
just how far we've come in only 30 years. And a big part of that is due to
him.
As a developer with some time on the Mac, I didn't always like some of the
technical particulars of the various APIs the Mac OS's used back in the late
90s. But Jobs refused to let Apple die, and he slowly but surely made things
better. It was my pleasure to re-up as an Apple developer a few months ago,
and I'm looking forward to learning to develop for OS X and iOS.
It's not going to be the same without him. I don't even want to think about
what people closer to him are going through; this is so terribly hard even
at a distance.
Thank you Mr. Jobs -- for everything -- and may you rest in peace.
Ray Gardener
Daylon Graphics Ltd.
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