{"id":389,"date":"2011-10-06T12:44:04","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T17:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/?p=389"},"modified":"2011-10-06T12:44:04","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T17:44:04","slug":"a-farewell-to-steve-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/a-farewell-to-steve-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"A Farewell to Steve Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I heard that Steve Jobs was resigning from Apple, I suspected that he wasn’t long for this world. But I was still taken aback to see how quickly the end came. He worked pretty much up till the end, I guess\u2014no real surprise there, for a man who had endless passion for creating art with technology and technology that could help us create art\u2014 but I was still surprised at how surprised and emotional I was. Why was I tearing up for a man that I had never met\u2014and for whom my only personal interchange with was a (frankly curt) email personally defending Apple’s rejection of my first iPhone app?<\/p>\n

The first computer I ever got to play with was an Apple ][. It belonged to a middle school friend’s wealthy doctor dad, and the son wasn’t too eager to let me play with it, but I did get to experience a few brief minutes of games like Wizardry and Choplifter. Shortly thereafter our school science class took a field trip to the high school mainframe computer lab and they let us play with the BASIC games there (I remember Super StarTrek and a very simple horse-racing game) and you could see the source code by typing LIST.<\/p>\n

My best friend’s dad became a office computer manager or salesman and got the latest Apple computers. I remember seeing a LISA briefly, but it was the Apple \/\/\/ that gave me the chance to write my first program. It was only there for a day, but I brought in a legal pad with my hand-written code on it and typed in my first game, a text-based Lunar Lander simulation that used what I’d learned in 8th grade physics class to apply thrusters and calculate the speed the capsule was dropping.<\/p>\n

It was another year or so before I had my own computer (the more affordable Commodore 64), but a few years later (1984) my best friend’s dad got him a Macintosh, and we made art with MacPaint in FatBits mode for a fantasy RPG game we were designing. I had designed my own character set for the C64, but what the Macintosh brought with its much more sophisticated and proportional fonts blew me away. \u00a0Clearly a new era in computing had arrived.<\/p>\n

My first Mac was an SE\/30, which I loved but was too busy with a heavy college work load to use it for much more than writing papers (and Tetris, Dark Castle and NetTrek), and moving to Ireland shortly thereafter meant I was without a computer at all for 3 years.<\/p>\n

On my return, however, I found a really poor economy (much like now) and no opportunity for decent employment for someone with an English degree. After a slew of crummy jobs, it was my experience doing layout with the Mac that got me a desktop publishing job at a print shop, that eventually led to a job as a multimedia (CD-ROM) designer, that became web programmer, that led to educational software developer, that led me to programming games and other apps for iOS.<\/p>\n

\"Intersection<\/a>In a sense I’ve come full circle: to doing what I love in a field that includes many of my interests: design, programming, typography, music, literature, language, AI, technology, communication, gaming, math, physics, simulations…. and while from a pure IT manager’s perspective many of these things \u00a0are irrelevant distractions, from this arty geek’s point of view, life on this planet would be a lot less interesting without Steve Jobs\u00a0and Apple, which includes all of the people from Steve Wozniak on who made his crazy visions possible .<\/p>\n

The photo of Steve Jobs standing under street signs reading “Liberal Arts” and “Technology” has been making the rounds again; it’s truly his legacy, and it has shaped my life in immeasurable ways.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Steve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I heard that Steve Jobs was resigning from Apple, I suspected that he wasn’t long for this world. But I was still taken aback to see how quickly the end came. He worked pretty much up till the end, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juggleware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}