Steve Jobs is gone, tonight.

But he’s not really gone. Everything he did is with us. With me.

I’m typing this blog post on an early 2008 model MacBook.

I don’t like eulogies. But I have a few emotions right now.

Omitting mention of a couple of generations of other Macs I’ve owned: I became a programmer largely because his work showed that computers could be beautiful, useful, and liberating to ordinary human beings.

Steve Jobs altered my direction in life. I wrote my first Kernighan and Ritchie hello world\n C program on a Mac Classic. I learned C++ on a Mac SE/30. I got my first job writing my resume on the SE/30.

Before that, I wrote my first Pascal program using MacPascal on the original 128K Macintosh in school.

Before that, I wrote BASIC programs on an Apple IIe, my first computer.

Skipping forward: at one point I bought an early PowerMac, but it was uninspiring: Apple had lost its way without Steve Jobs. I cursed Apple and abandoned it, bought a PC, and ran Linux for years. I never touched a Mac again until OS X came out. Steve Jobs was back!

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Steve Jobs was a programmer, an artist, a businessman, a philosopher, a psychologist, a salesman, a speechwriter, a fighter. He cared about beauty, about consistency, stuck to his visions, failed and succeeded and failed and succeeded. I live because humanity produces men like Steve Jobs.

That is all. Tomorrow is another day.

Update (2011-10-25)

I write this short update to note that I never did get around to writing my intended in-depth discussion of Steve Jobs, but will do so at some point. For example, it was too close in time for me to launch into a personal exploration of the dark, negative sides of his legacy.